As a younger creator, this would be all I could have daydreamed about. My favorite living author reshared my work. Now that I have more experience, I realize this is just another day.

“I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.”

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

 “How much should you charge your client for a video that looks like this?”

This is something I started telling myself when I realized I couldn’t be everything for everybody.

Creative people like us are very good at thinking about “brand.” But this can get in the way and block us creatively when we think about it too much for ourselves. 

Many people use context as a way to hide their insecurity.

So is guilt, shame, and debt. You should do whatever it takes to reduce the amount of dread you feel about doing your creative work.

We say we want to direct films, write novels, and perform on stage, but we don’t put in the work to get there.

“The Self-Confidence Jar (SCJ) concept is simple,” Hickman says. “Every time you make a promise to yourself and keep it, you are adding a ball to the SCJ. Every time you make a promise to yourself and break it, you are taking out a ball from the SCJ.” 

Instead of your project being a neat and tidy two-week turnaround, it extends into a third, fourth, and fifth week.

I have a lot of motivational tricks to keep me writing. But at the heart of those tricks is love. They wouldn’t work if I didn’t love it.

I’m not turning down millions of dollars by any stretch, but taking time off work to write my book has been its own challenge.

Commonly, folks will work for 25 minutes on, and five minutes off. When I started using this method, I worked for 48 minutes on, 12 minutes off.

Are there any creatives who are actually still growing on social in this year of our Lord 2025? The answer is yes, and his name is Seth Stern.

Why would I make one video in the same time it takes me to make six or eight? 

Tough questions aren’t fun to slog through while you’re in the dreaming phase—but they’ll save you hundreds of wasted hours and wasted dollars.

A shrewd business person might wonder why I don’t ask for their rates first, so I can get the best deal. “What if you overpay?” they wonder

“[The professional] respects the resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow.”

Could this the be the perk that gets your contract over the line?