creative

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Creator spotlight: StrawberryMilkMob

An end-of-2022 reminder from the photographer Sally Mann (and me)

I preach about the miracle of constraints and their ability to boost creativity in anyone. But I see un-useful constraints being used all the time by creators, so I wanted to make a small list of examples to clarify what a useful constraint looks like. There’s only two real

“Curation” shouldn’t be a dirty word, but it is. In the last decade, it has come to mean slapped-together-links, or outright-stolen content, used to fill space and capture just enough attention to convert free onlookers into consumers. There’s a lot of truth behind that association. In fact, I’

I know someone that spends close to $20,000 a month on a publicist. I know an author who spends something like that out of their own pocket each month on what’s called co-op, or extra prominent placement at airport bookstores. I know many people who spend more than that on advertising. I myself have hired publicists. I have paid for co-op. I used to spend six figures a year on Facebook ads for Daily Stoic. But several years ago I made a decision that changed my business and radically transformed my career. I stopped spending money on all of that. It’s not that I wasn’t getting a return on my investment. But it struck me just how empty it all was. I was putting all this time and energy and money into something, which were I ever to stop, would leave barely a trace behind! I was thinking of a wonderful quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, while criticizing advertising and publicity, pointed out that a person, “cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.” So I took that money and did something very different with it: I used it to start making stuff. I hired a videographer. I hired a social media manager. I hired another researcher. I hired a bunch of people. I took the entire budget that I had been putting into advertising and built a content team. We built the Daily Stoic podcast. We started making YouTube videos. We started cutting clips from the talks I gave. We wrote explainers and SEO pieces about philosophy. We launched DailyDad.com. We started @DailyPhilosopher on Instagram. Some people might shrug and say, “Yeah that’s called content marketing,” but it’s actually a deeper philosophical shift. Over the years, Daily Stoic has created hundreds of videos, articles and emails. With the 500-word daily newsletter, that’s a little more than two books a year of free content delivered straight to email inboxes around the world every morning. We’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in the world. Hundreds of hours of video on the great Stoic works, the rules the Stoics lived by, Stoic habits, Stoic don’ts, and Stoic questions for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of words across articles on the Big 3 (Marucs Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus), timeless Stoic strategies for happiness, dealing with stress, getting and staying motivated, overcoming procrastination, and handling rude people. A lot of people have seen that stuff as a result. We’ve done something like 63 million views on YouTube (4.4 million hours watched), and we just hit 1 million subscribers to the channel last week. The podcast does around 5 million downloads a month (well over 120M downloads). The email goes out to nearly 600,000 subscribers every morning…and has been sent something like 450 million times. You can add on top of that this bi-monthly email you’re reading here, plus my monthly Reading List Email too. Some of the people that have found this content have gone on to be customers, sure. Advertising and publicity are largely used as a means of attracting attention for someone’s business. Content marketing is also a way of doing that. But I’m not saying you should trade Strategy A for Strategy B, or that Strategy B is more cost effective. It probably isn’t–making all this content has been an enormous amount of work and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What I am saying is that instead of using your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that converts, you should use your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that matters. Because it is valuable in and of itself. Someone gets shown an ad and buys something, that’s great. But the people who get shown an ad and do nothing? What a lost opportunity! What a waste of their time and yours. It’s nice for the ego to get profiled in some publication…but it is quickly forgotten. Deciding to make videos, write articles, produce thousands of hours of audio–what I decided to prioritize my work around was making work. Creating value for others that lasts. I have a little notecard on my wall next to my desk that says “Am I Being a Good Steward of Stoicism?” I found I couldn’t sleep with myself knowing I was spending a bunch of money on extractive ads. But I can swell with pride knowing I spent the profits that my books have earned making content that millions of people have consumed for free, that has helped spread the ideas in Stoicism to people who would have never heard them otherwise. One helps the world, one helps no one but the ad network. I could stop making new content today…I could die tomorrow and the stuff we have made would keep on keeping on, reaching people, helping people. And this is really the best part: I would die a better person for having made it too. It was fun. It was educational. It was rewarding. I must say I wouldn’t go as far as saying all advertising is worthless (we have ads at the bottom of our emails a few times a week, including this one). At American Apparel, nothing was more rewarding than using our advertising budget to support causes like legalizing gay marriage or immigration reform. We also deliberately sought out publications that we believed were doing important work, that we felt contributed to the scene or the community–we put our money there, knowing that in addition to reaching people about our products, we were also helping that publication survive or thrive. The other reason I want to make it clear that I’m not just talking about content marketing versus ads is that I have very much stretched the definition of ‘content.’ The decision to open a small town bookstore in rural Texas? That’s not the same as a blogpost but it is doing stuff, it is making something that matters. The Painted Porch as a [...]

This article explores James Webb Young's book A Technique for Producing Ideas, which has shaped how we view idea formation since the 1940s.

The original blog post from Adam Curry that gave birth to podcasting

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“Every day the task seems hopeless and I feel like giving up.”

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Lesson of the Week: Types of Modules Last week, we introduced the concept of the Minimum Viable Newsletter. The idea is to fit the newsletter to your lifestyle, not the other way around, so you can stick with it. The best way we have found to create the minimum newsletter is to break it down into parts. Each part of your newsletter you can think of as a module.

Lesson of the Week: Minimum Viable Newsletter Consistency is the most important concept for your newsletter. All the good effects of writing online only occur if you consistently publish. Once you choose a cadence for your newsletter, you've got to stick to it. A consistent newsletter will give you room to improve your writing skills, create a feedback loop for your ideas, help you build relationships, open new doors, and build an audience.

Introduction To Sanderson’s Laws I like magic systems. That’s probably evident to those of you who have read my work. A solid, interesting and innovative system of magic in a book is something that really appeals to me. True, characters are what make a story narratively powerful—but magic is a l ...

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Hey, you. You're doing great. Click here to read this on the web. Source: Grosset & Dunlap Welcome to the 124th issue of Total Annarchy, a fortnightly…

writing tips

Or, why you should be a mutant

The Conceptual Ancestor of The Great White Magicians In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there is a character named Prospero. And in a parenthetical reference in The Creative Brain, Dr. Nancy Andreasen mentions, “Prospero [is] a great ‘white magician’ who is the conceptual ancestor of more modern wizards such as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings and

Who has their hand on the dial? Talk with someone who works at Apple, Amazon, Google, Linkedin, Facebook, etc, and they’ll be happy to give you tips on how to work the platform to your advant…

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A thousand day challenge to read a short story, a poem, and an essay every night.

And pickling jalapeños