creative

Refine your intuition, and trust your judgment.

The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity

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

(not management)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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...

I’ve spent a good few lockdown evenings recently in the company of a four-part documentary: 10 Years with Miyazaki. It’s a surprisingly low-fi and intimate encounter with the legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, produced by national broadcaster NHK.

Josh Spector shares his most valuable career move, how to speed up your audience growth, when it’s time to stop what you’re doing and move on, and more...

We learn valuable lessons when we experience failure and setbacks. Most of us wait for those failures to happen to us, however, instead of seeking them out. But deliberately making mistakes can give us the knowledge we need to more easily overcome obstacles in the future.

How are successful creators transforming audiences into empires? To better understand the process, here’s the framework I use: The Creator Lifecycle.

I don't remember when I first read The War of Art, but I know it changed my life. Of all of the books I have read since then, there are few I have returned to more often. Why? Because Steven Pressfield teaches you how to be an artist—a professional one. [...]

“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.”

Background This speech was delivered as the keynote address for the May 17, 2012 commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts. Speech Transcript I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. […]

“Most people don’t understand what Stoic is. They think that a Stoic wants to sort of be robust, no positive nor negative emotions, get rid of [their] attachment from the world…My definition is a Stoic Sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. Someone who […]

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

notes from the book