Seth Godin on Why He Blogs
“I do this because it is a privilege.”
Hillman Curtis on Reinvention
I’m spending less of my time thinking about how’s and why’s these days. My mind is stuck on the what’s. I clamber and climb over all sorts of ideas. I can pick up any single one of them and do some how/why work on it for a time. But it’s clear to me: none of the how’s or why’s will be very deep so long as there’s so many of them.
Should Bloggers Learn to Code?
@chase_reeves Do you think bloggers should learn to code design changes to their own sites? Or is hiring a designer for everything ok?
— Ross Lukeman (@rosslukeman) January 11, 2013
Great question. Here’s my take:
The best thing a blogger can focus on is providing value to their audience. That can mean any number of things, but it most likely has to do with creating content, preferably good content.
That’s what you do. That’s priority number 1. That’s your job.
Getting into the code and geeking out about the tech can distract you from that. It’s very common.
However, it’s also empowering to be personally capable of bringing your design idea to life.
I’m one of those guys who can do both: I can write the stuff and I can fiddle the bits that present the stuff. But here’s the thing: most of the successful people I know and/or look up to don’t do both, they do their job really, really well and are pro enough to let others fiddle the bits. And even though I can do both really well, I believe I can be excellent at only one.
So my advice is this: be really good at your job. Then, make changes to design and code as infrequently as possible and have someone who’s a pro at that stuff do it.
New social media buttons, hip sliders, something something manifestos, buttons and hovers and shadows and corners and responsiveness and yadda yadda yadda. Don’t fiddle with this stuff. Don’t get distracted by the shiny dumb things.
I can put you in the best recording studio in the world and your song will still sound shitty. Make a good song.
Hungry, Open, Grateful
It creeps in very subtle, and before I know it my thoughts are colored. They look entitled, they look lazy and cocky, wriggling out of the hard work.
It’s not hard to get to a place where people look up to you, and it’s real easy to let that color your thoughts.
Somehow I need to get it again, every morning: be hungry, be open, be grateful.
- Be hungry: you’re a caveman and this is about survival. Whichever tiger you choose to fight, it’s you or him – one’s not walking away.
- Be open: you don’t know it all, know it all. Have a kid, learn a language, roll with the punches. When you think you know it all you get brittle and needy, controlly.
- Be grateful: there’s breath in your lungs (take a breath), a woman by your side (don’t fuck it up), a son trying new stuff every day, parents and a brother who are way better than shitty, people you care about and who care about you. Don’t let the tiger or the getting of the tiger get you in a way that you miss this stuff.
The Self-Made Man’s Self-Worth Problem
“But the manhood of the Self-Made Man was ever in doubt, tied as it was to external factors and the whims of financial success. Just as the value of a company’s stock fluctuated from day to day, so could the value of the Self-Made Man.”
Here’s one thing I’ve learned from a year at the gym: I’m strong. Doesn’t matter how much weight I can or can’t pull, I can grow, build up strength, whatever’s necessary. I’m not defective.
There’s confidence that comes with that – wisdom enough to know when it’s too much weight, confidence enough to know what I can do.
Today’s fluctuating sense of worth, whether man or woman, is danger stuff. Confidence changes the kinds of thoughts you have.
Do you feel confident?
Guy Hock on the Four Beasts That Devour
“Through the years, I have greatly feared and sought to keep at bay the four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper — Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition.”
Dee Hock (guy who created Visa)
Be a Real Artist
“‘We’re artists, not producers.’ Then make some art! ‘No one will buy it.’ Are you insane? The point isn’t the money yet, it is the drive. Go to the Whole Foods and ask if you can hang it for free, and if they say no, hang it anyway. […] The natural human instinct is to create things, beginning with the toddler who is amazed that he was able to create such a fascinating product out of his butt, the difference is most toddlers grow up and sublimate that drive and create other things. You have not gotten past the poop, strike that, you have regressed to the oral stage, hence the emphasis on organic foods. Yes, the anal stage comes after the oral stage.”
Doing “something you love” for work is all the rage these days. And I’m all for it.
But before you try businessifying your passion, try out being a real artist — believe in a story so much you’ll give away your art for free. And if you don’t have the story yet, start looking.
Coffee is For Closers (Can I Get My Check Now?)
“Is Baldwin’s character a jerk or a savior? […] The secret is at the beginning, at 0:15, where it is revealed that Alec Baldwin doesn’t feel any of this, the whole speech is a work. If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach’s cursing at you, “this guy is awesome!”; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you have no right to talk to me like that, or — the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power — quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying.”
Very interesting article. Polarizing. More than it appears to be. Regardless of how I feel about the thing as a whole, I’m firing myself. I have a week to win my job back.
How to Own The Gym
“We go to gyms in large part to maintain a little goddamned self-respect, and to blow off steam, and to insist, against all odds, that we do remain fiercely vital physical beings.
… but if you just stick to a basic strength-training program, you can expect a certain wonderment about what the hell you were doing all those years, why nobody told you it was this simple before, and why nobody else in the gym appears to have heard the good news.
…You’ll be on a journey, at long last, learning how to own the gym, how to make your thrice-weekly health-club sessions into a confident, focused process invulnerable to bullshit. You’ll begin walking right past all the muscle-isolation weight machines, feeling a little sorry for all the guys who still think those are a good use of their time. You’ll start heading right back to the barbells instead, back in the gym’s darkest distant corner, and seeing them only as tools for your own ends, your own sports and goals.”
If you’re a human in a body I really really recommend reading this. I wasn’t expecting to read through this thing. Yet, here I am quoting from the very end of it.
The article perfectly sums up my experience with the gym over the past year. I can’t over-emphasize how much this stuff has meant to me as a man, how much feeling competent, earnest and strong changes things.
Seinfeld on How to Write a Joke
Seinfeld on how to write a joke. Bic clear barrel blue.