“Strangers are a blessing. Be they plane seat neighbors, people behind you in line at the bank, even wrong numbers. Ask these randos questions about their lives, their jobs, their kids.”
10 Ways to Find a Great Story
The Disease of More
“It took me a long time to accept the fact that just because something can be improved in my life, does not mean that it should be improved in my life.”
10 Ideas For The Interested This Week
“The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” — William Bernbach
If You Don’t Enjoy The Process Of Creating Something, It’s Unlikely Others Will Enjoy Consuming It
To create something people will love, find something you love to create.
Office Tactics for Introverts
“Consider ‘recharging’ vs. craving an escape that may not be possible. It is important to recognize when you’re feeling harried and take a beat. Find a place to breathe and relax. It’s incredible how 10 minutes can completely amp you for the rest of the day.”
The Complete Guide to Winning at Life When Things Go Wrong
“This guide works when anything shitty happens. Someone criticizes you online? Read this. Someone wants a refund on something that took you five years to build, and they’re mean about it? Read this. You got fired from a job or by a client? Read this.”
Two Ways to Argue Better
“Listen to people, get them to think about their own experience, and highlight your common humanity.”
Why Having a Niche Is Good for You and Your Business
“When your audience is ‘everyone,’ you have nothing guiding your creative decisions and therefore are forced into one of two strategies: (a) striving to alienate as few people as possible by avoiding anything remotely controversial (often at the expense of your more interesting or unique ideas), or (b) trying to capture as many people as you can, regardless of who is alienated in the process, by appealing to the most base instincts and impulses of human nature (in other words, the clickbait or fast-food approach).”
How to Gamify Your Life
“Define victory conditions. Write down success and failure criteria. These should be, at least in theory, within your control. If it’s mostly luck, then it’s not a game — it’s gambling.”
Most of the Internet Is Fake
“Less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake.”