I’m on vacation this week, working on my book and soaking up the Costa Rican sun. Please enjoy this curation of past podcast content. I’ll see you next week!

Three reasons why you should start freelancing tonight, even if it’s only part-time, or one single project.

How to learn from smart people, how to get your ideas heard, and much more.

As creators, we’re often tepted to push ourselves as fast and far as we can go. We want to create and deliver as much as we can. We want to say “yes.” Because we love the work! But maybe it pays to leave a little bit of hustle on the table. Maybe it pays to build in some margin.

If there’s skin in the game, people are involved. They’re engaged. They’re interested.

There are a lot of things you can consider when deciding whether or not to switch careers: money, stress, time, opportunity, passion. I can’t tell you what your life and family requires from you. But I can tell you that the career you’re most likely to be successful in is the one you get lost in.

If you’re producing a creative project, there are a thousand ways to get it done. For a while, these decisions paralyzed me. That was until I saw a funny meme.

As creators, the temptation of complexity is great. We think that if we can play something, or shoot something, or write something that most others simply couldn’t, our work will be meaningful to people. To some degree, this is true. But if we take a long, hard, honest look at the art that has really shaped our culture…we discover how simple it is.

If you’re a young videographer, you might be wondering if it’s worth it to go to college. With all the information available through YouTube videos and online courses, college might seem like a debt you don’t need to incur. But don’t make a “dropping out of college” vlog just yet. Let me break down some of the peripheral benefits.

If you can swap out only a small portion of your entertainment time for education time, you’ll exponentially increase your value as an employee, or as a freelancer in the open market. Think of it this way: our skills and our knowledge are subject to inflation of information. Every year, technology makes our jobs easier, thousands of people gain the skills we already have, and the value of our knowledge diminishes.

“Your entire life happens inside your body. It's the one home you will always occupy and can never sell.”

“We can’t have anyone sign a contract, and there can’t be any required posts. But trust me. If we get all these guys together with no pressure, they’ll post dozens of times.” This is what I told a brand manager, pitching her on an influencer trip for my client.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or if you’re up against a creative block, it might be because of the invisible audience. You have an imaginary audience, with imaginary critics in the front row, in a grand stadium called “Microsoft Word Stadium.” None of that exists.

In his study, participants had to work through a difficult puzzle. Some were told they could eat freshly baked cookies before working on the puzzle, and others were told they had to refrain. Those who refrained worked on the puzzle for less time than those who didn’t have to spend their willpower and decision-making power on not eating cookies.

After a while, I changed the analytics view to only show me website traffic month over month, instead of day over day. This decision brought me less anxiety, while still showing me helpful trends that I could use to grow my community.

Recently, I created a full marketing tech stack for a client selling an online course using only Squarespace. We created the landing page, captured emails, sent email campaigns, and hosted the course on Squarespace with their new Member Areas. This made the process so much easier since we didn’t have to switch between multiple software interfaces, and integrate them all.

Your parents and professors may be pushing you to get a "stable" job. But stable jobs don't exist anymore. I wish I could tell you how many of my friends have gotten laid off in an instant, along with hundreds of others, from top tier companies like Tesla, Uber, Headspace, AT&T, etc. Corporations have no loyalty to employees like they used to.

IMDB lists over 500,000 unique feature-length movies. Spotify hosts over 82 million songs. Research center UNESCO states that over two million books are published each year. So what makes you think you can’t publish something?

Betting money on your strategy working? Bold move. But do you know what’s an even bolder move? Betting time on it. Betting emotional energy on it. Betting the chance that you might be wrong on it. This is much more difficult to do, because these are more valuable resources.

How often do you instinctively type the letters Y, T, or I into your web browser? And how quickly do those letters populate YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram? Too quickly. And then, before you know it, you’ve been scrolling for fifteen minutes that you’ll never be able to get back. Redirector puts a line of defense in between you and wasted time.