Jason Fried on Growing Your Audience
It’s gonna take time and you shouldn’t be in a hurry.”
Jason Fried on Online Sharing & Commerce
Everything I bought was from someone who had taught me something… So I started thinking, ‘what if we started sharing the way these chefs shared?’”
Jason reminded me of the basics in this video. Making and sharing things online is the cheapest advertisement you can get.
And it can do more than just “get eyeballs”… it builds trust, understanding, a kind of friendship.
I’ve been blogging in some kind of way for the past 6 or so years. I had no hopes or plans about it early on; I just liked to write things that made people laugh and think.
Now I do it for a living… professionally it’s called “content creation,” but it’s the same ol’ shit: making stuff that teaches something people want to learn (and entertains wherever possible).
It feels new to hear Jason say it like this, like I somehow guessed right several years ago when I wrote random things here and there that earned a few comments.
David Hieatt on Art & Commerce
You make things in order to sell them. The difference between you and an artist is you can’t wait years to be discovered. You have to make what people want to buy. This is commerce. This is not art.”
Matt Haughy on Lifestyle Business
Where’s the TechCrunch of lifestyle businesses?”
Paul Graham on the Startup Idea Recipe
…finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that’s the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.”
Einstein on Creativity & Time
Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
Albert Einstein
Max Temkin on Business Strategy
Knowing what you’re doing is not nearly as important as knowing what you believe in and what your values are and understanding how to translate that into the decisions that you’re making.”
Max Temkin, Creator of Cards Against Humanity
Click the name and watch the talk. An excellent story of success found doing stuff you and your friends like.
David Foster Wallace on the Important Kind of Freedom
“The freedom of all to be lords of our own, personal skull-sized kingdoms… alone at the center of all creation.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about people and to sacrifice for them, over and over in myriad petty, little unsexy ways everyday. That is real freedom.”
Fuck.
Marco Arment on Podcasting (and competition) but Mostly the Podcasting Part
Oh goodness I loved this. I was there, in the audience, sitting with my friends, one of whom has a podcast, the artwork of which is prominently features on one of Marco’s slides.
I love this for several reasons.
1. Marco’s thoughts on podcasting. I am a podcaster. I love it. I feel this way about podcasting: up to now, it feels like the most natural thing I’ve ever done.
So I’m thrilled when a guy I admire, someone I think is much smarter than me, lauds podcasting as a beautiful, enriching, important and likely profitable thing. (See the quote below).
2. Marco’s openness about and investigation of his fears. He says “I’ve always been afraid of this.” But he doesn’t stop there. He also says, “so I asked myself, ‘why am I like this?'”
He a). realizes the stress level, the anxiety, the internal horror, b). does enough introspection to name it, and c). investigates why his self responds this way.
I’ve done some work of my own in this regard… but I’ve got things to learn from Marco in this regard because he doesn’t stop there.
3. He creates a business project in an attempt to get over his fear. Overcast forces him to swim upstream towards the fear he thinks isn’t true, isn’t necessary.
When we start businesses we think they’re forever. That’s what makes them exciting and horrifying. What if we thought about them as projects to learn and develop ourselves so our next thing is that much better? Yea, sounds la la, but I dig it.
4. “This succeeds or fails based on what I do with it.” Fuck stressing about the competition. Fuck stressing about market trends. Fuck trying to be like Steve Jobs. Engage yourself.
5. His closing thought:
I love this medium. This is so good. It really enables independent creative people and it’s fulfilling to listen to, fulfilling to make. I’m going to find it immensely satisfying to do anything I can to promote and improve and strengthen this world.”
There Isn’t Time by John Baldessari
When my son died I learned how flowers in vases don’t last long. So when I found this by John Baldessari it hit hard.