I’d never met him, but I used to be him.
He was fresh out of college, had just moved to Los Angeles to chase entertainment industry dreams, and had no idea what to do next.
He was where I had been 20 years ago.
“Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers — in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction — are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.”
“Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on just one field.”
“At the end of the day, do you want to pick apart something that happened or do you want to create something yourself? You can either sit around and be entertained or you can go out and try to be entertaining.”
“You can also teach Facebook’s algorithm to stop showing things you don’t want to see so that it will show you what you want to see.”
“The goal is not to be good — it’s to be great. The idea is to have the audience leave, and say, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ You have to work backwards from that result.”
“Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton.”
“You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more.”
“Buffett builds political capital thoughtfully, for the day he may need it, because, as his partner Charlie Munger noted, ‘Our core competency is knowing we don’t know the future.’”
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.” — Steve Martin