When you see someone standing at the top of the mountain - at the pinnacle of success - you automatically ignore the treacherous path they took to get there. Why? Because you can’t see it! All you see is the victory. And what’s hidden are the thousands of failures they suffered along the way. You can’t envy someone’s success without recognizing the suffering (past and present) it took the person to get it.
Read MoreThere’s a familiar refrain among pro athletes: “No one puts more pressure on me than I do.” That’s because excellence is a standard you set for yourself. No one can make you “work hard.” No one can make you care. Unless you find something you’re intrinsically interested in and want to become the best in the world at, you will never be great at it.
Read MoreWe are all drowning in information. When you have the entirety of human knowledge in your pocket, it’s not your brain that needs exercising, it’s your gut. Your instinct. That inexplicable feeling that tells you what you should do and when to do it. It’s not always right, but it’s always true for you. And it pushes you where you really want to go. And if you don’t spend time intentionally learning to listen to your gut, you’ll never escape the world’s noise.
Read MoreCreativity isn’t an exact science. When you start building something, you want it to be perfect from the very first spark. And nothing kills your momentum faster than realizing what you just made sucks. But it’s supposed to suck! It’s not fully formed yet - it’s just this delicate mass of ideas and features trying to find its form. It’s those who stick with their project through this early, ugly phase that come out the other side with something valuable. Stick with it.
Read MoreComparing 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 MoreThe world is flush with quick dopamine. You can make a TikTok video in minutes and get thousands of views in seconds. A Twitter thread that took you ten minutes to write can go viral with millions of impressions overnight. And it feels really good. It becomes brutally hard to stick with things that take much longer. But that’s where the real competitive advantage lives. When you do things that take years, not days, you compound your efforts with small, incremental gains, and immediately escape competition from anyone with a shorter time horizon. The longer it takes to do, the larger the competitive advantage in doing it.
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.
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