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creativity

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Surviving Advice Season

The new year is almost upon us, which means we’re about to enter advice season. Yay! My only advice for surviving advice season is to add the following caveats to everything you’re told: * If it’s about AI, add: “…for now.” or “…yet.” * If it’s about productivity,

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Newsletters are getting personal

Cold can be beautiful. But this week we’re talking about warming things up. I wrote about the encouraging trend of newsletters getting more personal. I admit, I thought this would start happening a few years ago, but let’s just be glad it’s happening at all! — CJ Elsewhere:

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What’s your creative refuge?

I did a stupid thing.  I had a summer packed with content strategy work — mostly about AI and mostly with big tech companies.  For some reason, I decided this meant I had to really buckle down and never leave my keyboard. I took only one vacation day for the entire

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The Best Newsletter in the World

This is not my usual newsletter day, but in the past few weeks, I’ve written a book, several guides, a course, and more articles than I can remember. I wish I could share them, but none had bylines. So, I figured I’d just randomly share some interesting links

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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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They tricked us.

All of the following rock guitar gods sold tens of millions of albums. Guitar players, like myself, believed for years that these artists had access to futuristic tools and production tactics that were out of reach for the ordinary musician. The opposite was true. * Eddie Van Halen’s iconic striped

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Consistency is simpler than you think.

Why does mediocre writing and photography often get more attention than best of the best? Why do mediocre “coaches” get more attention than industry veterans with decades of advice summed up in a single book, video, or blog post? What are we missing here? The hardest problem to solve in

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Are you useful?

I preach about the miracle of constraints and their ability to boost creativity in anyone. But I see un-useful constraints being used all the time by creators, so I wanted to make a small list of examples to clarify what a useful constraint looks like. There’s only two real