Chapter 1: You don’t have to be a genius
- Forget about the lone genius myth
- Good work is not created in vacuum—creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds
We’re all terrified of being amateurs
- There is a massive gap between mediocrity and brilliance, but mediocre is still on the spectrum, and you can move from mediocre to brilliant in small increments
- The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something
Good nonfiction is a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer and think at far greater length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives
— David Foster Wallacequotewriting
- The only way to find your voice is to use it. Talk about the things you love and your voice will follow.
Chapter 2: Think process, not product
- People really do want to know how the sausage gets made
- Become a documentarian of what you do
- Don’t think about making art, just keep track of what’s going on around you
Stock and flow…
Chapter 3: Share something small every day
Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be.
- You will regularly be tempted to abandon your own turf on the internet for a new, shiny social network—don’t!
Chapter 4: Open up your cabinet of curiosities
- Always give credit to original creators—attribution
- What is it?
- Who made it?
- When did they make it?
- Why should my audience care?
- How did I find it?
- Where can people find more things like it?
Chapter 5: Tell Good Stories
- Everything is a pitch
- Presentations
- Cover letter
- Personal essay
- Fundraising request
- Pitches are stories with the endings chopped off
- Act 1: The Past
- Where you’ve been
- What you want
- How you came to want it
- What you’ve done so far to get it
- Act 2: The Present
- Where you are now in your work
- How you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources
- Act 3: The Future
- Where you’re going
- Exactly how the person listening/reading can help you get there
- Act 1: The Past
Strike the adjectives from your bio… Don’t get cute. Don’t brag. Just state the facts.
Chapter 6: Teach What You Know
- The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to otheds
- Share your reading list
- Point to helpful reference materials
- Create some tutorials and post them online
- Use pictures, words and video
- Take people step-by-step through part of your process
Make people better at something they want to be better at
- When you teach someone how to do your work, you are generating more interest in it
Chapter 7: Don’t Turn Into Human Spam
- You wants hearts, not eyeballs
- Make stuff you love
- Talk about stuff you love
- Don’t worry about making connections, they will naturally follow
Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.
Chapter 8: Learn To Take A Punch
- Your work is something you do, not who you are
- Don’t feed trolls—care about feedback from people that want to see your work improve, no one else
Chapter 9: Sell Out
- Keep a mailing list if you can (email is Lindy)
Above all, recognise that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
Chapter 10: Stick Around
- Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you need to ask the question: what’s next?
- If you’re not embarrassed of who you were last year, you’re not learning enough