“If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.” General Jim Mattis - AKA Call Sign Chaos Read, read, read. I cannot emphasize this enough. Fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, technical manuals, I don't…
What have you done for me lately? - Janet Jackson It used to be that only artists or architects had portfolios - large, briefcase-like things they'd carry around that would showcase their previous work. So that they could land their next work. But with the Internet, and word processors, and…
You have your vocation and you have your advocation - Author's mentor You need something that takes care of the bills. And you have something (at least I hope you have something) that you care about. A larger thing that matters to you. Very rarely, you can put the two…
You see this in a lot of business type books and resources. "Pay yourself first" usually means something like waiting until the last moment to pay back debt (or make a payment on one) or some other form of valuing yourself over others. But you can apply it to other…
Any marketable skill, no matter how advanced or niche, is built on a foundation of simpler skills. Seen differently, successfully executing any skill is directly dependent on your ability to execute the simpler ones. Let's try an example. Jeff Atwood says that programmers are typists first, programmers second, and I…
In his memoir, Eat a Peach, David Chang talks about all the other stuff that you have to do in order to successfully run a business. Things like getting good at real estate, basic contract law, navigating bureaucracies for regulations, and so forth. He calls this the Compound Art -…
I'll let Jake summarize the idea for you. I was training for a run with a friend. It was after sunset in the parking lot at work. It was a nice, if slightly muggy, summer evening. We had just finished running sprints back-and-forth across the parking lot and, between breaths,…
Do you remember in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the one with the time travel skit toward the end), where Harry and his friends are saved by some elusive figure who summons a patronus and saves them from certain doom? And then do you remember how, later on,…