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Anything worth doing is worth doing for a long time. Because eventually, you’ll start to run into people who have heard of you. Or remember one of your works. Or talked to their friends about you. Or saw you perform somewhere. Or listened to you do an interview. Or read something you wrote. Or did a case study on you in one of their marketing or psychology or communication…

Productivity is not a science. We just tell ourselves it is.  That’s the human tendency.  To seek out systems and structures and seven step equations for getting things done. We just love any construct that satisfies our sense of order, offers security, conserves cognitive effort and gives us reassurance that some outside agent is absorbing the responsibility and doing the work for us. But the reality is, when it…

I have a friend who’s a perfectionist. She would rather show nothing than show work that’s less than her best. And I tell her all the time, look, I understand you want to put your best foot forward, but you’ll never impress anyone by putting no foot forward. The reality is, being amazing is nice, but it’s not always necessary. What’s most important––at least, for now––is having something, anything,…

Thanks to everyone at The Smart Show for making this possible!

Nobody can sell you better than you. I bought into that lie for a long time. Like many artists, I made the proclamation that I was my own best salesman. That only I can do my own head. And that I don’t need anyone’s help hawking my wares, thank you very much. Which is really just a stubborn way of saying I’m a control freak about my work, I…

What counts as work these days? Conceptualizing our next big idea, taking productivity seminars and going to the coffee shop to organize all of our material?That’s not work, that’s hiding. Learning in public, doing book reports of other people’s research and dissecting our creative process? That’s not work, that’s studying. Telling strangers they’re wrong for being who they are and prolifically sharing our thoughts about what other people are…

Time is the great thickener of things. When it comes to your art, time is the strongest agent for making your work robust enough to find its audience and make a difference. More than talent, more than connections, more than money, more than anything, time is the invisible hand that always has your back. Because no matter how many romantic stories you hear about innovators and artists and computer…

For many years, I existed in one of two modes: Rewind or fast forward. Watching the trailer for my imagined future or studying the game tape from my imperfect past. Rehearsing what I was about to say or revising what I should have said. Learning from yesterday or lusting for tomorrow. Which left me little time to exist in any of the other, better, healthier modes: Play and pause…

Sentences are my spiritual currency.  Throughout my week, I’m constantly scouring and learning and reading and annotating from any number of newspapers, blogs, online publications, books, articles, songs, art pieces, podcasts, eavesdroppings, random conversations and other sources of inspiration. Turns out, most of these sentences can be organized into about eleven different categories, aka, compartments of life that are meaningful to me. And since I enjoy being a signal tower of things…

A friend of mine just called it quits with her longtime boyfriend. She said they broke up because of an interpersonal imbalance. A poor division of relational labor, to use her term. Turns out, after four years of being the girlfriend and the therapist and the babysitter and the parent, she had nothing left. One individual, carrying the entirety of the relationship load, making a career out of catering…