I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
How to balance creativity with your career
Hey there,
This week is our board meeting and review/planning sessions. I was so busy in zoom calls I completely forgot the newsletter! We dive deep into our strategy and execution as a leadership team and usually come away with great insights and action plans. It's really interesting and fun...and exhausting.
For that reason, the newsletter is a little shorter today. I'll be back next week with more.
Specifically: next week I'm going to share my thoughts on the Basecamp conflict and mass exit. There's a lot we all can learn from it.
FROM ART OF NEWSLETTERS
Jason Feifer - How to balance creativity with your career
Jason is the Editor in Chief at Entrepreneur magazine, hosts a podcast called Build for Tomorrow, and he is the author of a forthcoming book titled Build for Tomorrow, Not for Yesterday.
This is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. Jason is incredibly high energy and fills it with great advice. I particularly enjoyed how he structures his creative output around a monthly schedule for all his competing priorities.
WHAT I'M READING
Do you live in a political bubble?
This was fascinating to me. You can input your address and see how politically diverse your neighborhood is! I love these visualizations from The New York Times. Whichever side of the political spectrum you fall on, we have been growing further apart, even geographically, and that can only lead to less understanding and empathy. It's important to know if you are living in an echo chamber and try to get outside your bubble a bit if you can.
Read the whole article here »
A LITTLE INSPIRATION
Making a living as a comic book artist
We've got a new episode of our I am a creator documentary series. I think you'll really enjoy it.
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? You’ve probably seen some version of this question before. It’s a good one, though sometimes the answer isn’t immediately obvious. That’s why I like Graham Weaver’s 8 questions for what to do with your life. Graham founded the private equity firm Alpine Investors, and he teaches at Stanford. In Chapter 2 of my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth, I credit him with a principle he shared with his MBA students called "worse first",...
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...