We all spend time going down rabbit holes. This is the experience of being on social media. Social media, however, is usually not very productive. 

It takes a lot of confidence to forge into unknown creative territory, telling yourself you’ll figure it out along the way. But there’s another kind of confidence.

“If you're the duck, you have to sit cross-legged in a circle alongside dozens of other ducks, waiting patiently to be chosen. Sometimes you get picked. Most of the time you don’t.“

I thought I heard someone shout this last night as I took trash bins out to the street. Usually my mind doesn’t register random shouts on the street. I’ve learned to tune them out. But I heard this one. I used to live in Venice. 

It’s a grid of eight boxes, with a few scattered titles, bullet points, and lines on it. It helps me reduce stress, improve my health, stay productive while I work, remember my long-term projects, and achieve work-life balance. 

Public speaking is like driving a car full of people. For the next few minutes, you’re going to take them somewhere. How you do it matters. 

Social media platforms make analytics easy. You can see the views, comments likes, shares, saves, profile visits, and follows that each piece of content earned. But just because these numbers are focal doesn’t meant mean they’re the numbers we should be focusing on. 

“I can only make sense of my unaccountable good fortune by assuming that it means I am under special obligation to make good use of it.”

When I was 21 years old, I found myself in Washington D.C. for a day alone. I wandered around, looked at some stuff, met a friend for lunch, and scalped a ticket to a baseball game. In the middle of it all, my father told me to meet a colleague of his who ran a recruiting firm. 

Today is the 100th day of the year, and this is my 100th blog in 100 days. Here are four things I’ve learned. 

Something interesting I’ve discovered while taking on daily challenges is this: about once every six weeks, I really don’t want to do the work. Today is one of those days.

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

Seth Godin has published a short blog every single day for more than 10,000 days in a row. Beeple has created a new digital artwork from start to finish every single day for 6551 days. You might be reading these facts and thinking to yourself, “I could never do that. I’m not that kind of person.”

In December of 2014, a friend and I drove to Hollywood to see an obscure poet-turned-rapper. Ten years later, an important realization came around.

“Is this tennis? Grinding for a year and a half, and then you lose to a guy who has a knee brace on?”

Stress says “I might lose this.” It says, “this might not go well. They might not like me. I might fail. I’m going to look like an idiot.”

Can you call a business a success if it closes its doors? Can you say you are successful if your small business isn’t growing? If you have to shut down or sell or leave a business, can you really call that successful? 

I think you can. 

“The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” 

If you’re lucky, your clients understand about 10% of what you do. Most of them probably only understand about 5% of what you do. 

We make a promise to ourselves to show up and work on our art, but when we don’t, nothing bad happens. People don’t yell at us, we don’t get fired, art doesn’t stop hanging out with us. It’s all fine.