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CJ Chilvers

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Never meet your heroes?

Never meet your heroes, they say.  Well, I met Nuno Bettencourt last week and he turned out to be a nice dude. Plus, he’s also the template for a well-lived creative life. For those who don’t know, Nuno is one of the last guitar gods still performing. You

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Some Idiot Wrote This

My favorite creative prompt.

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Creativity vs. Productivity 🥊

I saved this from a post by Tobias van Schneider, which has now been deleted. Spot on, though. Links are break quicker these days, which is just one more reason I need to create more of these link-sharing posts. Feel free to send me any that you think I should

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Personalization is creepy.

File these rules under “totally obvious advice that almost no one follows.” 1. Don’t be creepy. 2. Treat everyone online as if you’re talking to them in real life. 3. Long-term relationships build long-term businesses. 4. You are never automatically entitled to track a person. You wouldn’t

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RIP: The External 🧠

Last week, while everyone was arguing over who the next social media giant was going to be, Evernote laid off its entire U.S. staff: “Evernote, the app that has sought for two decades to find a large paying audience for its ‘external brain,’ is moving its operations to Italy,

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Thanks for the advice!

I don’t like analyzing personal newsletters. They’re whatever their creator wants them to be. There’s no rules. That goes for mine as well. But I am interested in looking back every year or two to check in on what you think. I don’t nitpick. I don’

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Opens Wins

RSS is still the way. I’ve written about the utility and idealism of RSS in the past, but I think enough time has passed for us to reflect on whether the anti-RSS decade we’ve just been through worked for anyone. Were consumers better off? Were publishers better off?

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Don’t mess with librarians.

This weekend, I helped my wife in her booth at the American Library Association Conference (my wife helps libraries with fundraising). I’ve been to the ALA conference a few times in the past decade, but this time felt different. The conference is usually overshadowed by authors, big publishers, and

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Publish or perish? Document or die.

I don’t believe in goals. I believe in process. I believe in process because I used to believe in goals. What I’m about to reveal to you is far more boring than goal setting, but far more effective. Goals tend to get further away the closer you get

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Why would you write a book in 2023?

It doesn’t make much sense to write a book in 2023 — especially a nonfiction book. In fact, your readers would likely pay 10X as much to get the same information in a video-based course. But, for many reasons, some of us still prefer creating books over any other medium.