Confidence is earned, through many dust ups and the dust-offs thereafter.

I realized there’s no such thing as a perfect class. Not every part of every online course will hit home. The important part is to find someone you relate to. Someone who speaks your language.

There was once a man who knew all things. No joke. All things.

Here’s part one of my most expensive freelance mistakes. I made these mistakes so you don’t have to.

I would take a deep breath before freelance meetings and say to myself, just fake it til you make it. If they ask you to do something you don’t know how to do, you can figure it out later. Just tell them you can do it. Don’t lose this client. Don’t screw this up.

If you’re always pushing the envelope, you’re always stressed about whether you can pull it off. You’re never in the moment, because you’ve never done it before.

When we have a problem we look for the right answer. It’s easy to see the world as a binary choice between right and wrong, good and bad, smart and dumb. But anyone who has been faced with a difficult decision knows it’s not that simple.

A mistake many young creators make is announcing “I’m back!” after a period of not posting on social media.

There’s a Hyundai commercial I see all the time when I’m watching baseball that I hate. It’s so conventional. It tries so hard to be cool, but falls short in a huge way. Like the dad cracking jokes at the cookout, but he’s wearing New Balance 624s and has his Samsung on a belt clip.

The real race begins after the idea, and time spent worrying is time not spent working on it. The real differentiator is not the idea, but the elbow grease it takes to make that idea happen. 

This isn’t a blog about getting “discovered.” That doesn’t happen anymore. This is a blog about putting forth the best work you can, with the resources you have at the moment.

So why does Toyota make commercials showing the Rav4 off-roading? Because they’re marketing to people who see themselves as adventurous, but are too busy to actually take a camping trip.

No pianist who doesn’t know their part expects to nail it live. No wide receiver who isn’t expecting the ball can make the catch. No creative who doesn’t believe they will be successful will be successful.

When I write sales pages, I make sure the very first thing a website visitor sees is a concise description of the product, and a clear button to buy it immediately. If someone arrives at the page, already convinced to buy from a previous ad or email, why is your sales page getting in the way of that?

We get too concerned with the long-term implications of our actions. Like teenagers, deliberating for weeks about whether or not we should talk to our crush, we consider all the unhelpful angles of a potential project.

Why are you being cheap? I don’t mean cheap, like, you’re resistant to spending money. I mean cheap like you’re resistant to charging money. Why are your services and products cheap?

The first sign that a brand director doesn’t create on their own is when they can’t effectively describe what they want. They use phrases like, “I’m just not feeling this,” or “this just isn’t doing it for me,” or “I need this to look more premium.”

Strategies are everywhere. But objectives are rare. And it’s ineffective to pick a strategy without knowing your objective.

We don’t need to sift through the garbage to find our next idea. We can find inspiration everywhere, and we don’t need that much to start creating our next good work.

Every day, I open Instagram, and secretly hope that one of my videos got one million views overnight. It’s as if I’m shaking a Magic 8 Ball asking, “Am I famous yet?”