Comparing yourself to others is a dangerous game. You have no idea what the other person has gone through to achieve the success you see from the outside. Very likely it’s more suffering and uncertainty than you could imagine. Still, there is a benefit to mapping progress against your industry peers. And if you do compare yourself to other people, compare yourself against the best.
Read MoreI’ve spent much of my life running from problem to problem. Putting out “urgent” fires. Answering an endless stream of emails. Because most of our “priorities” are set by other people. But if you have that whisper in your mind that the lifestyle you’re living isn’t the one you envisioned before “life” took over, then that’s a signal to start paying attention to whose priorities you’re really living for. They’re probably not yours.
Read MoreI’m not going to lie to you… 2022 was a fucking hard year. It was my second full year of building a film and television writing business in Hollywood with my wife, and it was a year that kept on asking us: “are you sure you want to do this…?? Are you really SURE!?” That’s why I’m calling 2022 the “Year of Perseverance.”
Read MoreBuilding a business or product is a process of iteration. You create something, test it in the real world, get feedback, iterate based on that feedback, test it again, and so on until you have something that works. And the hardest part of this process isn’t the initial creating (that’s the most fun!). It’s interpreting and then implementing feedback from the real world. Because this isn’t an exact science. As Naval Ravikant says, if you took all the advice from everyone in the world, it would all cancel out to zero. You alone must decide what feedback to use and what to ignore. So here are some ways to help you take constructive feedback and use it to make your work better.
Read MoreNo one cares about what you’re doing at much as you do. While your project - whether it’s a software product, novel, graphic art, screenplay, piece of code - whatever - is the most important thing in your life, as soon as you send it out into the world, it becomes the 10-20th most important thing to the person you sent it to. This is why, even if your work is obviously good, you must market it aggressively.
Read MoreEverything you desire creates a fear of not getting it. The same is true with wanting to “win” or find “success.” You want to be successful so badly that the fear of failing actually hurts your chances of succeeding. That’s the paradox of success. To win big, you have to let go of the outcome.
Read MoreMost people never think about designing their lifestyle. So, society designs it for them based on the incentives of those with the most power: corporations and governments. Where does that leave the mass majority of us? Living for the evenings and weekends, spending our money on cheap dopamine, and forgoing what actually makes us feel alive. And we live this life because we settle for it. You get only what you settle for.
Read MoreAnyone can read a book about a subject and apply what they learn. But that isn’t going to give you the success of the true masters in the field. To master something, you can’t just learn it. You have to practice it with your natural instincts guiding the way.
Read MoreIt feels good to collect intellectual prizes. When you finish a book, bookmark a Twitter thread, or watch a YouTube video, you feel like you’ve accomplished something. And you have. But the danger is that you keep collecting these intellectual prizes at the expense of building something - at the expense of creativity. Learning is great. But doing is better.
Read MoreWhere you focus your time, so goes your life. And one of the big decisions you have to make is whether to go really deep into one topic / subject / skill / profession or to jump around and take shallow slices from various domains instead. Should you specialize or diversify?
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