The better we know our audience, the better we can serve our audience.
And the better we serve our audience, the more likely they are to recommend our work to others.
That’s why I set out to better understand my audience through a simple experiment with my For The Interested newsletter subscribers. It turned out great and is something you can easily do with your own audience.
Careers are not defined by jobs.
Our career success is determined by our ability to develop assets and use them to acquire the value we seek.
Jobs are simply transactions — mechanisms through which we exchange our assets for that which we value.
When we see career development through this prism, we can reframe how we approach our career.
“I know you’re probably thinking, ‘I don’t know how to get a million people involved in anything.’ Well, let me tell you a secret: No one does when they begin. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.”
“Your job is not to write for an audience. Your job is to write for your audience’s audience.”
“The easiest way to start is to forget all the best practices, all the make-pretend to-dos and just do the thing, the actual activity, the crucial part of what makes a writer a writer, a singer a singer, and a stock analyst a stock analyst in the first place.”
“There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth.”
“When you find something you really love — a painting, or a book, or a movie — spend as much time as you can studying it. Stand in front of a painting for 2 hours. Re-read a book several times. Freeze-frame a movie and study the composition of each scene.”
“If your spiritual regimen includes a rewards system or punishment, it’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t have to meditate for an hour, practice yoga every day or eat 100% gluten-free and organic to earn that chocolate or get that pedicure you’ve been wanting. That’s not self-love or self-care.”
“The experts noted clear changes from Trump’s unscripted answers 30 years ago to those in 2017, in some cases stark enough to raise questions about his brain health. They noted, however, that the same sort of linguistic decline can also reflect stress, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue.”
“It seems that the traits that set one up for exceptional success in high school and college — ‘self-discipline, conscientiousness and the ability to comply with rules’ — are not the same traits that lead individuals to start disruptive companies or make shocking breakthroughs.”