Love Your Work

Submit your questions and mark your calendars for my upcoming AMA/Livestream.

In 1977, Richard Bachman published his first novel. In an unusual move for a first-time author, Bachman made his publisher promise to release his books with hardly any marketing. Bachman stacked the dice against himself Bachman's books were to skip the hardcover format and go straight to bargain-bin paperback – the kind you'd find mixed in with other nobody-authors, at a truck stop on I-80, somewh...

"Crumb time" is the little pieces of time that get lost throughout the day. Instead of giving away your crumb time to unproductive distractions, build systems that complete big projects with small actions. Today, I'll tell you how. Crumb time is everywhere throughout our days. Whenever we do something substantial with our time, little chunks of time of various sizes and shapes fall to the floor. W...

Do you ever feel like you don't have the time and energy to learn about everything you want to know? Is it hard to stay focused on reading one book, when there's ten others you want to read? You need curiosity management. Curiosity management is the management of your thirst to know things. In a world with unlimited access to information, and finite time and energy, it's impossible to read every b...

Five years ago, I wrote about how - after ten years as a self-employed independent creator - I hoped to "make it." I now realize, I never will. Five years ago, I sat at my keyboard to have a serious conversation with myself. It had been ten years since I had woken up to a day with nothing scheduled, and wondered how I was going to fill it with something that both made life worth living, and also p...

I recently advertised my book on a billboard in Times Square. It was cheaper than you think, and was up for less time than you might expect. But it's still paying dividends. Times Square is a big deal (duh) Times Square is the epitome of mainstream success. The biggest brands have locations there, and any big brand you can name advertises there. 350,000 people walk through Times Square on a typica...

In fifteen years as a self-employed creator, I've learned how to finish what matters . I follow a nine-step process that makes an easy-to-remember acronym, that also describes what this process does: E.R.A.S.E. F.E.A.R. Fear is Resistance Fear is at the root of most struggles to finish creative projects. Even when you think you're merely getting interested in another project, that's often fear mas...

When Facebook was first expanding, they used a timeless military strategy to win their most-crucial first users. You can use this strategy to attack your toughest projects, by leveraging hidden complexity to lend devastating power to simple actions. Facebook faced tough competitors When Facebook was starting, in the mid-aughts, it was only available at colleges. It wasn't easy to win new users on...

Industrial Society and Its Future , is otherwise known as "The Unabomber Manifesto," written by Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynsnki is a terrorist who killed three people, and injured twenty-three others, by sending bombs through the mail, between 1978 and 1995. He used his terror campaign to exploit the negativity bias of media and pressure the Washington Post and New York Times into publishing his 35,000-...

There are some invisible structures in language, and using them can be the difference between your message being forgotten or living through the ages. These are The Elements of Eloquence , which is the title of Mark Forsyth's book. I first picked this up a couple years ago, and have read it several times since then. I think it's one of the best writing books, and has dramatically improved my writi...

In Trust Me, I'm Lying , Ryan Holiday reveals the media manipulation tactics he used as Marketing Director of American Apparel, and for his PR clients. Meanwhile, he exposes the inner workings of a modern media machine in which incentives make it impossible for the version of reality depicted in the media to come close to resembling the truth. I think it's Holiday's best book, and one of the best...

In 2018, Matthew Walker was on a media blitz, promoting his book, Why We Sleep . I was one of the many people who picked up the book. It slowly ruined my sleep. But recently, I fixed it. No, this is not a takedown Before I go further, this is not a "takedown" of Why We Sleep , like the one that's been floating around. I've read that takedown, and I didn't find it convincing. I trust that Why We Sl...

One thing I hear from a lot from readers of The Heart to Start , is that many people have no problem starting new projects. They instead struggle with finishing them. I can relate. Like many creative people, I once struggled to finish projects. I always had new ideas, I left books half-read, projects half-finished. I had done lots of creative work, and had little to show for it. Now I still always...

What will the future look like? In his most recent November appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show, entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan presents a cohesive explanation of the current world , and plausible scenarios of how things will play out. I found Balaji's theories so mesmerizing, I listened to the four-and-a-half-hour podcast several times, then read and took notes on the transcript . Lis...

It seems even the most devout techno-utopiasts carry around a Moleskine notebook. They appreciate the way writing longhand on paper alters their thought processes. Yet the same people think writing on a typewriter is absurd, performative, pretentious, or a deliberate troll. Over the past year, I've grown to love writing on a typewriter. I didn't write my first three books on a typewriter, but I am...

There's a reason the expression, "unfinished business" has such provocative power. Unfinished projects stack up like skeletons in our cluttered mental closets. We know if we crack open that door, we'll be reminded of our failed intentions, our foolish optimism, and our broken promises – to others and to ourselves. But unfinished business doesn't get the credit it deserves. Unfinished projects are...

There's something I want to talk about, but frankly, I'm a little embarrassed to do so. However, I write with my former self in mind, and my former self would want to know about this. So here I go. I want to talk about how to be somebody. What do I mean by "somebody?" To be somebody is to be known for your work. To have your name synonymous – or even better, eponymous – with your accomplishments....

Systems save energy. Especially if the system helps you with something you do every day. This is why I have a system for cooking. When you're hungry, you make bad decisions, such as grabbing the quickest food you can find – which often happens to be unhealthy food. My cooking system ensures I never have to think about what to eat, or how to prepare it. It frees my time and my mind, so I can focus...

Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that's what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by. The way foragers "worked" can tell us a lot about the way we, as creators, work. Farming gets a lot of output with little effort No one can be exactly sure when a human first planted a seed to grow...

There's a story I think of every time I'm in the throes of a difficult project. It's from the movie, Catch Me if You Can , about the infamous con artist, Frank Abignale, Jr. Frank's Father, Frank Senior, tells him a story : Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn't quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he turned that crea...

When Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he designed and built his own scaffolding. But, it only covered half of the ceiling. So he painted the first half of the ceiling, then removed the scaffolding. When he finally got to view his work from the floor, seventy feet below, it was as if he were seeing it with new eyes. After two years work, he didn't like what he saw. Michelangelo...

On October 10th, 1901 – 120 years ago, almost to the day – the grandstand was full at the horse track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But not to see horses. There was a parade of more than 100 of these new things called automobiles, and several other events, including races of automobiles with electric engines and with steam engines. But the main event was a race of gasoline automobiles. By the time t...

Leonardo da Vinci is easily the most-accomplished procrastinator who ever lived. He finished hardly any projects at all. He was great at many things, but he wasn't great at shipping. The world would have been better off if Leonardo da Vinci had treated shipping as a skill. Far be it for me to criticize anything Leonardo da Vinci did. Despite his repeated failure to ship, he lives on today as one o...

When Vincent van Gogh began his career as an artist, he had already failed at everything else. He even got fired from his own family's business in the process. Not seeing any alternative, he completely immersed himself in art. In one two-week period, he created 120 drawings. But exactly none of those drawings are famous today. What feels like waste is not waste Last week, I talked about the Iceber...

1920s, London. Radclyffe Hall was pacing around her study. She wore close-cropped hair, a tweed skirt, and a man's silk smoking jacket and tie. Her partner, Uma Troubridge, sat in a nearby chair, reading the writing of Radclyffe – or "John," as she preferred to be called. But just as Uma's voice wavered a bit, John grabbed the papers from her hand, and threw them in the fire. In the 1920s, throwin...