“It’s sobering to consider that the rival we’re so jealous of may in fact be jealous of us.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is The Key

Would you rather take advice from a peer-reviewed study or a close friend? Technically the peer-reviewed study is more accurate. It’s more scientific. It’s more likely to end up being true. But the advice from a close friend somehow feels more true.

Axe launched their Find Your Magic campaign a few years ago, and since then have completely rebranded into an inclusive and encouraging voice in the men’s hygiene space. Getting people to take you seriously after being the GoDaddy of deodorant is tough. But Axe did it by being self-aware.

“I’m a dog walker by day and a designer by night.” People structure sentences like this often. (Usually those people are creatives who aren’t being that creative.) But I’m on board with the sentiment. Make your money, then move your dreams forward.

I take weekends off now. I didn’t used to. I used to work Friday nights and Saturday mornings and I used to check my email on accident on Sundays.

Oat milk didn’t start a shoving match with cow’s milk on the supermarket shelves. It didn’t disguise itself as regular milk in a plastic jug. Oat milk didn’t ask people to make a big switch in their life. Oat milk just started hanging out with the hipsters at third wave coffee shops.

When I bought an outdoor table from Home Depot to put on the walkway outside the front door of my old apartment, I started imagining myself at a cafe in France, perched on the balcony, enjoying the cool morning as I read a book.

I enjoy the process of making coffee. I like how it’s a tactical thing I can do with my hands, engaging my senses in my increasingly digital existence. But as I sit on the patio, sipping the slightly watered down, not perfectly extracted cup of coffee I made myself, I can’t help but wish I walked across the street to my usual coffee shop.

It’s one of the reasons I like writing so much, especially writing every day. We can all get away without opinions for a a few posts, just like we can get away without opinions for a few hours at a party. But writing and parties both become dull without a strong point of view. To be comfortable expressing yourself? That’s how you know you’ve found true friends, and true art.

Ad fatigue is real, and when busy people who are watching TV to relax start seeing the same commercials again and again, their brains automatically tune them out. Brands can conquer this by using recurring characters, like Your Cousin From Boston.

My buddy Leo is a freelance writer. He’s a surfer of LA coffee shops, sipping espresso and writing on his laptop all across the county. I was chatting with him yesterday about a project, and he told me that he just ordered a sticker that says “Writer for Hire” to put on his laptop.

No one likes delivering bad news. But when bad news is leveraged to position good news as even better, we can inspire positive action from our communities and audiences.

We’ve all stretched one task into an entire day. And we’ve all accomplished dozens of tasks in just a few hours. The difference between the two is a centered mind, and a focused schedule.

A niche is simply the topic you create about and the people you create for. If you don’t have a niche, you’ll create work without a strong perspective, or clear lane. Most travel content is just that. An oversaturated market without a strong perspective, aiming to be simply “inspirational.”

When I started my career, things were a lot like the way I just described. I was busy all the time, hustling to network and make rent, working late nights. I developed a grit, and a sort of illogical conviction that I could do it. I wasn’t sure it was true, but I believed it was because that was the only way I could make it happen.

Accounting becomes a major chore when you only do it just before tax day. But if you do it every day, it takes 45 seconds.

Customers were feeling a whirlwind of emotions, as were restaurants, bars, brands, and all businesses. No one knew what was coming next, and everyone was so busy putting their own affairs in order, and hunkering down, that no one had time to say a word. Except Guinness.

We must automate our own decisions to counter these corporate giants’ automations. Not many people had a social media addiction when the feed was chronological. But when more content became automatic, the problem began. And it hasn’t stopped.

The good news with these is that we don’t have to come up with 75 completely unique concepts for each video. They’re almost identical except for the copy we’re split testing. The bad news is that if we make one mistake, it usually gets applied to all 75 assets. Then we have to fix and re-export each one.

Delayed gratification is the backbone of most long projects. We stack small bricks on the city of our dreams, each day, knowing that the bricks we carry today will become incredible views in a few tomorrows. However, avoiding all immediate gratification is a path to exasperation.