“It’s about being appropriately engaged in your life.”
I recently created a course for Fizzle on the essentials of productivity specifically for someone building an online business. David Allen featured prominently.
…that is what graphic design is for.”
“We all want to do our best work; that’s the goal. But it’s ok to ship something decent; better than nothing. Stick to True and Good and let the history professors decide what was ‘best.’”
Your’s Truly
Found in this wonderful audio from a talk Merlin and John Gruber gave at SXSW in 2009. Highly recommended.
“No one gets into something like this without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages” and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention.”
What’s so great, so amazing, about this racket is that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can obsess over your work, build an audience based on deep mutual respect, and eventually opportunities to earn money from it will present themselves. I don’t know how it works, I only know that it does. […]
There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.
“We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”
“You gotta have something to say.”
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
“The big change in my life, going from someone who was struggling to pay bills to where I am now, which is having a lot of fun working on a seven figure business with amazing people, was that I decided everybody that encounters me ever is going to benefit more than I benefit.
I don’t always achieve it; I try real hard. But it guides your interactions with people and things become obvious.”
“Make yourself come up with a topic sentence. […] Write ‘Topic:’ at the top of the page and then in one sentence describe what it is you are about to write.
It’s actually so much harder to do [than you think] and it’s not just a 4th grader thing to do. It gives you focus and it centers you, and, you know what, at anytime when you’re writing you can go back and change the topic.”
Here’s some more writing tips on this site, and for all you freelancers out there (or wannabe freelancers), here’s a big ol’ guide about how to become a freelance writer.