The Road Not Taken Analysis Cover

Why Is “The Road Not Taken” One of the Most Famous Poems of All Time?

I’m sure you recognize this fragment:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — 
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It’s from The Road Not Taken, written by Robert Frost in 1916, one of the most popular poems of all time. People read, talk about, and teach it in schools all around the world to this day. But in order to survive for over 100 years, the poem couldn’t just be popular.

It also needed enemies.

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How To Survive as a Writer Cover

How To Survive as a Writer

Being a writer is hard. In an interview, storytelling legend and screenwriting teacher to the stars, Robert McKee, explains:

“Your job as a writer is to make sense out of life. Comic or tragic and anything in between, but you have to make sense out of life. You understand what that means? Making sense out of life? And this is why most people can’t do it. Because they can’t make sense out of life, let alone make sense out of life and then express it in writing.”

As writers, it’s our duty to live in our heads. And there’s no place more enticing, more exciting, yet at the same time more dangerous and more terrifying than the human mind. Time and again, we have to venture into this place from which some never make it back. Whatever we bring home we have to process, to shape, to form. Until somehow, something worth saying emerges, which often never happens. And so we have to go back.

For the times we do go “oh, that’s interesting,” we then have to chisel an arrow out of the marble block of messy information. An arrow loaded with emotion, dipped in reason, and wrapped in gold. Because otherwise, it’ll never land in the reader’s heart. And at the end of it?

After all the turmoil, the struggle, and the pain, the best we can do is fire the arrow into a sea of dark faces. Because even if we don’t play for the applause, in the end, our fate lies in the hands of the audience. Always. So the best we can do is show up, shoot, and pray.

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Use This Storytelling Framework to Craft Amazing Narratives Cover

Use This Storytelling Framework to Craft Amazing Narratives

There is a class of entertainment that is underrated, in spite of its external success: stories about telling stories. Hit shows like How I Met Your Mother, Suits, or Gilmore Girls and blockbusters like Ocean’s Eleven, the Bourne movies, and Fight Club all thrive on their characters’ abilities to launch into enchanting monologues at a second’s notice.

Whoever asks Barney Stinson about his playbook, platinum rule, or Valentine’s Day can expect a full-fledged fake history lesson. Despite what the gang might say, they love it. Because who tells stories like that?

Sometimes, life throws us the same opportunity to tell a story however we want to tell it. It might be an essay for a job application, a speech to your old class, or a new acquaintance asking about a childhood experience. But we’re not a character in a movie, so we never have those stories locked and loaded and often butcher them as a result.

How can we change that?

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Trust in a World Full of Hidden Agendas Cover

Trust in a World Full of Hidden Agendas

In June 2017, fundraising for blockchain startups via so-called initial coin offerings, or ICOs, exploded to over $450 million and has since stayed there, on average.

The crypto space is new and unregulated, so collecting funds from retail investors via direct contributions is fast, easy, and profitable. Whenever money comes in these three flavors, scams are an immediate side effect.

Websites, white papers and roadmaps can be pulled out of thin air, so many have. Confido, Prodeum and LoopX are just a few of the projects that disappeared with millions of people’s dollars and even legit projects, like Tezos, can get stuck in frozen funds hell.

But the most interesting ICO of 2017 was neither a scam, nor did it promise a great future.

In fact, it was a completely useless project. Literally.

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How To Improve Your Writing With 6 Questions Cover

How To Improve Your Writing With 6 Questions

A writer’s job is to bring order to chaos. It’s our duty to descend into the cluttered world of ideas and then structure whatever insight we manage to wring from its hands.

Therefore, writing is by definition a messy process. The goal of this post is not so much to get you to adopt my version of it — although I will give you the tools if you wish to do so — but to get you to examine your own.

When I recently did, I found I constantly ask myself six questions about writing. Before, after and during. All the time. They’re definitely not a checklist. More of a blurry circle my mind spins in.

I want to show you those questions. Show you you’re not alone. Seeing my lose structure should help accept your own. Then, you can set out to find the little that’s there. So you can build on it. That’s the plan.

Let’s go.

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Nobody Likes You, But Nobody Is Just 30% Of The People Cover

Nobody Likes You, But Nobody Is Just 30% Of The People

“Nobody likes you around here” is one of the nastiest weapons of negative workplace communication.

It hits right in the heart, gets you worked up and ready to lash out yourself, but worst of all, you start to wonder if they’re right.

So how do you respond to that phrase when it’s thrown right in your face?

Here’s the response I’ve come up with:

“Yeah, but nobody is just 30% of the people.”

This’ll startle them and they’ll scratch their head. In the meantime, you can go on to explain what I’m about to tell you.

There is a great story in James Altucher’s book Choose Yourself, which I will never forget.

He alludes to it on his blog as the 30/30/30 rule. James kept using images from the same woman doing yoga poses for his blog posts without giving her credit. Eventually, she messaged him and they started talking.

She told him that she found over the years, whatever she did, 30% of people loved her for it, 30% hated her for it and 30% just didn’t give a damn.

In my experience, that’s pretty accurate. So why not spend your time on those that love you?

“No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.”

— James Altucher

And if they don’t buy this wonderful story, or point to the logical flaw of the remaining 10% missing, because we’ve used 30%, not 33%, nothing takes the wind out of their sails faster than a good old…

“Now what?”

How To Come Up With Great Billboards Cover

How To Come Up With Great Billboards

I want to share a series of billboards which I think are great because:

  1. It makes you think about and compare two brands, pick a side and stick to it.
  2. It’s reactive in that the advertisers responded to the feedback and kept the momentum going with new billboards — this is rare, most billboards are static and get old fast.
  3. It won across channels, went viral online and had built-in community participation.

I hope you love cars as much as I do. Let’s roll!

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