He worked fast, grabbing my hair and cutting it quickly, grabbing and cutting, grabbing and cutting. Each time he cut, closing the scissors on another pinch of hair, his hand flourished. It reminded of a pianist–a real pianist, you know, that strikes down on the keys and lets his hand bounce up.

Sometimes, it makes sense to charge by the hour. I find it best to charge by the hour when I’m doing work that I don’t often do, or when I’m doing work I don’t want to be doing.

There’s a confusing paradigm when it comes to gear. Is it better to get good gear and grow into it? Or is it better to upgrade only when you’ve maxed out your current setup?

When we got on set with the influencer, the brand obviously wanted their product called exactly the right thing. But when it was stuffed inside the full script, the influencer had a hard time remembering exactly what it was called. Every time he messed up, the brand producers on set spouted back the correct name, as if it wasn’t that hard.

Why is it like this? Why is it so hard to follow our own advice? Why can we give other people such great advice, but then be so bad at following it ourselves?

I think the reason that templates work so well is because they give you confidence and clarity even when you feel unconfident and confused.

That’s when I came up with my best idea yet. I emailed everyone who said they were interested at 10pm, asking them to call me the next morning at 7am. Only one of them did.

If you don’t know what you want to accomplish, spend some time today thinking about it. If you do know where you want to be, but don’t know how to get there, spend some time working backwards from your goal.

Daniel Pink keeps a plastic toilet on his desk, to remind himself to flush away silly mistakes. This is inspired by one of the best to ever play softball, Jennie Finch, who also kept a tiny plastic toilet in the dugout for her and her teammates.

You can eavesdrop on me and my cousin’s conversation on Instagram DM, if you like.

If you meet someone who works at a brand that you want to work with, what’s the next step? Ask for their email? Send a cold pitch? Ask what their marketing goals are? No.

So when I’m on YouTube, and Paramount shows me a two-minute trailer for their new movie, I’m willing to watch it. I’m on YouTube to watch content like that anyway, so now I get to see something interesting, and then I get to watch the video I wanted to watch. But when Toyota shows me a 15-second, highly produced ad about their summer car sale, I skip it. I’m not there to see content like that.

After the first day of shooting, I got to my hotel room, opened my laptop, and sent emails for two hours. I immediately got flashbacks to 2019. Pre-producing one project, while producing another, while post-producing a third. It’s a lot.

One of the downsides of pursuing intense focus is that your whole world can begin to seem like it’s just one thing, all revolving around the project.

He learned quick, worked hard, and treated everyone he met with respect and kindness. That’s what garnered this compliment from my photographer friend. I was struck by how simple and powerful that description was.

Maybe you’re in a similar spot. Maybe you’re working hard at two things. Maybe you wish you could fast forward a few years, or quit your day job, leave your boss on read, and put it all on red.

The next step is to show up to the places where success happens. And to show up as often as the successful people do. That’s what designing a trajectory looks like. And, just for the record, getting magically discovered as a prodigy by a record label (or a movie studio or a publishing house) isn’t part of the trajectory. That’s just daydreaming.

Do you have the Sunday scaries? You know, the rising tide of stress and anxiety that creeps up as the sun goes down on Sunday evening? The feeling of dread for Monday morning, for all the things that you’ll have to do, for all the mistakes you might make?

We’ve seen villains spruce up ad campaigns for years, most notably with Allstate’s Mayhem character. Recently, the villain-based ad campaign has been pretty popular, with Jimmy John’s, Little Caesars, and Mint Mobile introducing their own villains.

Life gets boring. There are two options when this happens. Switching your focus to something new, or deepening your interest even further.