I read a sentence recently by Chris Gayomali in an article about Olympic runner Noah Lyles that struck me. It said, “Meanwhile, Noah Nyles is a sprinter who seems to have more fun than anyone else and isn’t afraid to use his platform to advocate for Black lives mattering.”

If you want to build a habit of working out, you better redefine what working out means to you. The thing that gets in the way of habit development is feeling like our small steps aren’t meaningful enough to pursue.

This isn’t a blog about how to make an online class. It’s only a blog about how to sell one, with good copywriting.

I used to have endless ideas and no follow through. I jumped from unfinished project to unfinished project in search of novelty and excitement. Meanwhile, my creative goals went unaccomplished. Then I discovered the creative sprint.

Different clients want different things. Some clients want to impress their boss with your work. Some clients want to not lose their job with your work.

All the Instagram Ad best practices say to focus on the products. To call out features. To not get too creative. Dandy Del Mar broke all those rules.

Novelty is almost impossible to predict because it’s a moving target. What’s new this year will be old next year. And you can’t just aim your artistic rifle to outer space and hope you hit novelty–you’ll find obscurity.

I think he was wearing sketchers, and a baggy sweater. His posture was not great. He wasn’t that tall. He greeted everyone softly, with a much smaller voice than I imagined. I was surprised that this was the guy ESPN chose for their commercial.

You can write about something life-changing, something really monumental, in such a boring way that it changes no one’s life.

I would be hounding Amazing for a refund right now. But hounding an independent writer who is packing and shipping his self-published book on his own? I don’t feel so good about that.

I wish I could say that the blog has been a great success, and that I’m amassing a huge audience, and that I’m getting a lot of opportunities from it. But I’m not.

If you want to produce consistent and compelling work in a creative space, you need to consume content in that space every day.

He always used to pitch me on a quick workout routine. A few times through a circuit that only took 35 minutes or so. But I knew that 35 minutes really meant 45 minutes, and that he wasn’t accounting for the changing time, the travel time, the warm up time, the cool down time, (or all the breaks I needed to take).

If you want to make good art, you have to take risks. Safe art isn’t art. It’s a corporate video, or a picture you buy at Home Goods.

I sat across the dinner table from a man who had been on the moon, and I was racking my brain, trying to come up with something to ask him.

It’s hard to “get in” as a producer. But once you’re in with a few directors and production companies, a few connects is more than enough to keep you busy. So how do you get in with these people?

If you can make a great first impression, people won’t see you that way. They’ll just see you as someone doing your job.

“Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, ‘I’ll get back on track tomorrow,’ try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.”

“It’s good to be frugal, but if you don’t spend your money to make your life or your relationships or your work easier, what exactly are you going to spend it on?

YouTube TV has been running an ad during the NBA Finals, featuring an old lady obsessing over the NBA Finals, even while her family throws her a birthday party. This is an unexpected choice of talent. Why would YouTube do this? The numbers don’t lie: the people who watch the NBA the most are males in their mid-30s.