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If you want to improve your writing, match your punctuation to the mood. Punctuation is to writing as music is to movies. In The Joker, the renowned composer Hildur Guðnadóttir used the cello in the opening scenes to create empathy with the protagonist. But then, as The Joker’s dark side and inner turmoil was revealed,

(not management)

You don’t need a will of iron to make real change in your life. The secret to hitting big creative goals is taking much smaller steps, much more often.

Dear Everybody, I channel successful creators in my personal life and at Gumroad. Here’s what I’ve learned from them in the past six months, in their own words. Don’t wait until you have a big following (i.e. start now)… “I had fewer than 300 followers when I started”

Creatives have two ways of working: beer mode and coffee mode. Beer mode is a state of unfocused play where you discover new ideas. In contrast, coffee mode is a state of focus where you work towards a specific outcome.

The top tips, strategies and channels that'll help you get more subscribers this year!

How to tune up your description, welcome email, and promotion. There’s one thing everyone who writes a newsletter has in common: They want more people to read it. To help you grow your newsletter I’ve put together a five-day plan you can follow to “tune up” the way you position and promote it in order...

Creators have a hierarchy of needs as they grow. Understanding these needs helps you build products that creators love so let's explore each need in detail.

You have five seconds to get people’s attention. Books, blogs, emails, reports, it doesn’t matter – if you don’t sell them in five seconds you’ve exhausted most of their patience. Good ideas are easy to write, bad ideas are hard. Difficulty is a quality signal, and writer’s block usually indicates more about your ideas than your writing. Impatience has increased with social media. Someone reading a book 20 years ago had few other distractions. Today a phone offers infinite, nonstop competition for your dopamine. Writers of everything from emails to books have to accept that reality. Whoever...

Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula, involving what researcher Douglas Hofstadter calls “jootsing.” Here’s how understanding systems can help us think more creatively.

A summary and excerpts of the book "Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind" by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Try to find a definition of ‘good taste’ and you’ll likely fail. It seems to be something we’re supposed to innately understand. But given…

The personal website seems to making a comeback. Why? When social networks fail, we return to the hub: the place you own, the place where you control the experience. It's where you're indexed for life, if you're lucky. It's where you're background checked by employers, neighbors, new friends, and

People don’t write because it “takes too long.” Typing and editing is too much work, so they don’t put their best ideas on paper. This strategy saves time in the short term, but over the long term, it hurts them. Writing can save you time. Publishing ideas on paper is how you create intellectual capital

A look back at the instant classic about why generalists triumph in a specialized world.

For the aspiring and the professional alike

As it became the way to define a whole new generation of internet explorers, I asked myself that question and came up with a definition.

Positioning is like finding a seat on a crowded bus. Most brands sleepwalk onto the bus and sit on top of one another. The smart brands look left, right, find an empty row, paint their logo on it and start singing sweetly like the Sirens

Writing in 1801, at the age of 30, Ludwig van Beethoven complained about his diminishing hearing: “from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” As Arthur C. Brooks recounts in a 2019 op-ed, published in the Washington Post, Beethoven “raged” against his decline, insisting on performing, […]

Try to be a legitimately interesting person with all the varied things you find fascinating, and don't worry if it takes longer than the growth you see from others.

The right words will shape the entire experience.

There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can write, and those who think they can’t. And, very often, both are wrong. The truth is, most of us fall somewhere in the middle. We are all capable of producing good writing. Or, at least, better writing.

The go-to owned community platform for creators will play a major role in the creator economy. To understand why let's explore the owned community matrix.

Newcomers to social media and influencer marketing naively assume that if they can build a big following, those followers will buy from them. But that's not always the case.

My process for putting together my weekly newsletter week after week...

A truth that applies to many fields, which can frustrate some as much as it energizes others, is that the person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not who has the best idea, or the right answer. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads. C. R. Hallpike is a respected anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young author’s recent book on the history of humans. It states: It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, so...

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