articles

On sharing what you have learned and learning in return.

The Business Model of Good Taste

Because perfect is impossible and perfectionism is about hiding.

Refine your intuition, and trust your judgment.

The case for consistent writing is less about self-improvement, and more about economics. Here's why.

How to think about writing, promotion, and community

The secret tips, tricks, and habits of those who make a great living writing.

Despite getting rewarded repeatedly with promotions, compensation, recognition, and praise, I wasn't motivated enough to do another year.

The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity

Build your ideas with the experience of 100+ founders – condensed into 5 min reports.

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.