The Serious Guide to Joke Writing

In The Serious Guide to Joke Writing, Sally Holloway shares exercises for comedy writing. I read it earlier this year. Here’s the directive I took away from it when I was Taking inventory of the books I read in the first half of the year:

Consider other perspectives.

I enjoyed the book and wanted to share some highlights. Sally talks about deliberately starting work on a joke and then leaving it to take a walk so that your brain can process it in the background:

If you’re not sure how wonderful this idea is then imagine if garden tools did background processing and, as long as you got hold of your spade and did some serious digging for half an hour, it would carry on digging after you had gone off shopping until it finished the job. Your brain is that powerful. Use it.

This is also a good way to tackle any problem1. Programmers can hammer away at a problem for hours. Then when they walk away for a few minutes and that’s when the solution hits them.

I’ve written before about whether comedy writing can be learned or not. Everyone’s funniest friends aren’t sitting in their rooms at night practicing. But that’s different from learning to write jokes and working on them. Professional comedians still get their reps in:

I admit my brain is attuned to joke writing, but I’m still putting time in. I run the subject through as many of my joke writing methods as appropriate. I like to do at least an hour a day (and more if I’m on a tight deadline). I break it up, do a bit here and a bit there.

Professionals are better at using the tools, but they still use tools and put time in. It’s the same as what Joe Toplyn says. It’s the same as what Simon Rich says. Rich also talks about the importance of my takeaway directive of considering other perspectives. He says Rugrats was a huge influence. Adults seem to be doing weird things, from the perspective of toddlers.

Here’s Holloway describing the exercise:

Think about it from the point of view of any objects or things or people that are directly or indirectly involved…

It’s part of a larger exercise of considering other perspectives. She says to describe things to an alien, describe them to a child, describe them to a foreigner. It’s another tool to use.

Even knowing how to use the tools, a professional doesn’t sit down, write ten jokes, then get ten great jokes out of it:

I say rubbish things, I say obscure things, I say puns a child of five could have written, and I say great things, but I needed to say all the other things to get there. So when students look at me that way I say: this is the process.

I believe in processes and systems. Like many other creatives, comedians create a lot of things and then whittle them down and refine. I’m not great at writing jokes yet. Or even good or okay at it. Still, I’ll work on it because I want to write things that are fun to read.

  1. Some people worry about meditation taking this kind of background processing away. With meditation, you learn to reign in the monkey mind. The gibbon might be manning the back burners. I’ll keep an eye on this as I learn to meditate.

Book note on Infinite Jest: Quality

I watched the first season of Simon Rich’s Man Seeking Woman this week. There’s a clip where Josh is preparing his apartment and Infinite Jest is one of the books he arranges for display. I finished reading Infinite Jest around this time last year. (According to my calendar, my free time was primarily occupied with reading Infinite Jest and playing Counter-Strike: GO. Not a bad month.)

I was mostly reading the softcover but I picked a Kindle version up to read on-the-go. So I do have some things highlighted for the Kindle version:

“[…] He said she had a face that’d break your heart and then also break the heart of whoever like rushed over to your aid as you pitched over sideways grabbing your chest.”

I highlighted things that I thought were well written. In a sense, they’re sentences written in a way that I’d like to write. I know I’ll never get to David Foster Wallace’s mastery of English. (“Especially with that attitude! Never say never.” This is one of those actual nevers that’s just plain true.) If I can write anything even, say, 5% as good, I’ll be happy.

A good way to start is probably looking at some more things he’s written that I enjoy. It’s good to review for inspiration.

I picked some clothing up and began separating it by smell into wearable and unwearable.

I recently wrote about the phrase “Only emotion endures”. Something I enjoyed throughout Infinite Jest is how fun the descriptions are of ordinary activity. I know what sorting clothes by smell is like. It happens. It makes me think of underpacking for vacations. Or times where laundromat trips have been scheduled a little too far apart.

He was never what you’d call a ladies’ man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.

It’s a great description. You get a broad sense of his physical appearance and his personality. It’s a deep look because you know someone that’s in the drinking-not-dancing crowd.

I’ve been reading Simon Rich’s work and enjoying the absurdist humor. Infinite Jest has its fair share:

Already carrying 230 pounds and bench-pressing well over that, Gately clocked a 4.4 40 in 7th grade, and the legend is that the Beverly Middle School coach ran even faster than that into the locker room to jack off over the stopwatch.

I’d like to know if a joke like that just came to him or if he had to work it multiple times and rewrite it. I have 170 other highlights in the book, and it was fun skimming the list. I’d like to write things that make people smile the way I smiled many many times while reading Infinite Jest.

Smartcuts

In Smartcuts, Shane Snow looks at seemingly overnight successes. Many people point out that overnight success is actually the result of years of hard work. However, tons of people put the same years of hard work in and don’t achieve the same level of success. A lot of times, wild success comes through putting hard work in along with taking a different route—a smartcut.

David Heinemeier Hansson created Ruby on Rails and is the co-founder of Basecamp. The 37signals blog has been an inspiration through my career. I appreciate what Basecamp’s leadership has done in highlighting the importance of work-life balance.

(If I had a sidebar: Basecamp comes from 37signals, originally a design agency co-founded by Ernest Kim. Ernest made Kicksology in the early 2000s. I’ve always been delighted by Basecamp having a historical connection to Kicksology. My friends would go to Kicksology to learn about the latest sneakers, and I would go to learn about the latest in HTML table layouts. The design holds up remarkably well 15 years later.)

Rails provides scaffolding for web apps. You could build on top of that scaffolding confident that smart people have made initial decisions for you. You might know better solutions for certain parts, but the defaults provided a great place to start.

“You can build on top of a lot of things that exist in this world,” David Heinemeier Hansson told me. “Somebody goes in and does that hard, ground level science based work. “And then on top of that,” he smiles, “you build the art.”

With a framework in place you can focus on the things specific to your idea. If we had infinite time it be fine to Tinker. But we don’t so focus is important. Once you know the goal then you can work towards it and also keep an eye out for any lateral moves so you there Astor.

Siegel cared more about his long-term journey than his short-term paycheck; she screened every offer through the lens of, “Will this help Jimmy get SNL one day?” He said “no” to television sitcoms, “no” to acting jobs that might take him too far away from SNL.

Great lesson on focus and an abundance mindset. It depends on where you are in your journey but you don’t have to say yes to every single opportunity. It’s important to learn to say no to those good-not-great opportunities. Having an end goal in mind makes that filtering more straightforward.

One of the ideas in Smartcuts that stuck with me was the value of calculators early on in math education:

The overwhelming majority of academic research about calculators indicates that leveraging such tools improves conceptual understanding. By learning the tool (calculator) first, we actually master the discipline (math) faster.

Tooling has become so important in web development. When I learned HTML, I made a page that had a single sentence and I was fascinated that I could just change the text. It’s different today.

WIth the right tools, you can put together a very basic app in one day. A novice won’t know exactly what’s going on underneath the hood. Still, the end product is more interesting than a page with a single sentence.

Let’s say you had one month to learn something, you could 1.) learn CSS from the ground up or 2.) jump into learning a CSS framework. Learning from the ground up, you’d probably have a good understanding of CSS. However, you probably couldn’t put a layout together as robust as what you would get through a framework.

Success is measured by your goal. If your goal is building something quickly, it might be better to use the framework and spend the majority of time talking to users. If your goal is to become a web developer, the ground-level understanding is more important.

Rails grew popular quickly because it helped developers build things quickly. Authentication is taken care of, where writing this yourself would take an eternity with no experience.

The most popular Rails resource is probably the Michael Hartl tutorial. He introduces tools early on. Tools which you’ll eventually use if you want to make anything production-ready. In that book, learning Ruby is the means to the end. In that case, the discipline is building something useful with Rails.

Smartcuts also covers the power of constraints.

Constraints made New York City an architectural marvel. Manhattan Island’s narrow shape forced the city to build up, to rethink and renew; it impelled architects to reinvent stone buildings into steel skyscrapers.

Started reading through Sprint and it reminds me how important constraints are for creativity. My current constraint is one page each day. One of the best things I took away from design sprints is learning how to time block creative activities. You hit the end of a block and continue moving on with what you have.

You just have to be ruthless about moving on. The end result of the process is more important than polishing during any single step.

Moving on can be difficult if you’re working alone. With no outside facilitator, you just need to trust your plan and know that following the system will work. That said, it takes a few attempts to make sure the system works in the first place. When you see success with the system then you’ll build up belief in it.

I’ve iterated on my system for writing daily posts. There were many small failures along the way, but I trust it now. If I want to finish a post in an hour or two, I can do that.

The next step is taking what I’ve learned in creating a system for quantity and begin creating a system that helps me improve the quality of writing. I’ll keep my eyes open for a smartcut along the way.

The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth

James Altucher followed up Choose Yourself! with The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. The books are similar, with Altucher sharing what he’s learned through his experiences. Guide to Wealth is focuses more on careers and starting businesses.

The same thing happens with the idea muscle. Somewhere around idea number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means it’s building up. Break through this. Come up with ten ideas.

Coming up with the ideas is one thing. Building them and sharing them is another.

In How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams explains the concept of skill multipliers. Some general skills that can be applied to you whatever your expertise is that will separate you from the bulk of the pack. Leaders in any field always have some of these skill multipliers.

James knows the importance of one of these multipliers: public speaking. You have to be able to share your ideas. His advice for who to observe and learn from? TED speakers? Nope. Stand-up comedians:

Comedians are the best public speakers and are up against the most brutal audiences, so you must study them. Learn from them.

Comedians iterate. In interviews, when comedians are asked about how they got to where they are, most say they got used to failing in front of live audiences. It’s the best way to test material. Not that it becomes pleasurable in the moment—bombing is still bombing—but they learn not to dwell on it.

One of the best stories in the book is about Gene Wolfe, who found success iterating on the machine that cooks Pringles (this excerpt isn’t from the book, it’s from an interview with Gene):

LP: Along those lines, is it true you invented the machine that makes Pringles potato chips?

GW: I developed it. I did not invent it. That was done by a German gentlemen whose name I’ve forgotten for years. I developed the machine that cooks them. He had invented the basic idea, how to make the potato dough, pressing it between two forms, more or less as in a wrap-around, immersing them in hot cooking oil, and so forth and so on. And we were then called in, I was in the engineering development division, and asked to develop mass production equipment to make these chips. And we divided the task into the dough making/dough rolling portion, which was done by Len Hooper, and the cooking portion, which was done by me, and then the pickoff and salting portion, which was done by someone else, and then the can filling/can sealing portion which was done by a man who was almost driven insane by the program. Because he would develop a machine, and he would have it almost ready to go, and they would say “Oh, instead of 300 cans a minute, make it 500 cans a minute.” And so he would have to throw out a bunch of stuff, and develop the new machine, and when he got that one about ready, they’d say “make it 700 cans a minute.” And they almost put him in a mental hospital. He took his job very seriously and he just about flipped out.

Once he was done iterating on potato chips, he pivoted his career. One page and one day at a time. From Guide to Wealth:

Gene has been an adult for almost 25,000 days. He writes a page a day. A page is about three hundred words words. A paragraph or two. Can you do that? Twenty-five thousand pages. About eighty books’ worth of pages. Gene ended up writing fifty published novels, including many best-sellers and award winners. He didn’t get stereotyped and stuffed into that Pringles can, as dead as the chips he created.

Lately I’ve been going back through what I’ve written for this 100 Posts, 100 Days project. Sometimes I can’t fully remember writing certain posts. It’s more content than I want to go through in one sitting. That speaks to successfully creating quantity, which was the goal, knowing quality would probably suffer. It’s rewarding to see it come together. The next step is shifting the focus to quality.

Choose Yourself!

Some of my posts have been written around things I hear on James Altucher’s podcast. I enjoyed his book Choose Yourself!. I like his outlook on life. Altucher has had it all and lost it all and got it back and lost it all again. A few times over. His background is diverse and his time making media websites in the 90s is fascinating. He’ll mention making Mobb Deep’s original website the way I’d say, “Oh I picked up this bag of gummi sour snakes at the corner store on the way here.”

When I say I like Altucher’s outlook on life, a lot of that has to do with his grasp of what’s important for happiness. I liked how he described what he calls the currency of unhappiness:

I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness.

A lot of times it seems like blocks of unhappiness lead to happiness. There’s an idea that it’s worked in the past, So we can do that again. It’s important to realize it’s not the only way, though. A lot of the factors in life that contribute to happiness are achievable now. Not everything is at the next milestone.

He also has a pretty good sense of what it takes to be great at something. He’s been successful in multiple fields: creating businesses, chess, the stock market, and now writing and podcasting. Here are a few of his tips regarding where to find inspiration for something you’re trying to master:

Study the history of the form you want to master. Study every nuance. If you want to write, read not only all of your contemporaries, but the influences of those contemporaries, and their influences. Additionally, draw inspiration from other art forms. From music, art, and there again, go back to the influences of your inspirations, and go back to their influences, and so on.

This reminds me of Smartcuts. A lot of breakthroughs come from lateral thinking. Normal practices in one field applied to other fields can produce effective results. Meditation principles applied to productivity leads to deep work. It’s focusing on the present.

We might not have wormholes at hand but all of us time travel every day. You can cherish memories and look forward to future plans. If those thoughts are given a negative shade, you might be worried or anxious. Here’s what Altucher recommends for helping that:

All you have to do is stay in the present. When you catch yourself upset about the past or worried about the future, say to yourself, “Ah, I’m time traveling,” then STOP. That’s what meditation is.

I’ve been practicing meditation and am quickly learning how important it is to be able to catch yourself in your thoughts. If something is bugging you then you’re better able to be deliberate about accepting that and putting it out of mind for good. Reading The Obstacle is the Way, things clicked for me in realizing just how much is out of our control. And energy that would be spent worrying about those things can be applied productively somewhere else.

I used to think a lot about what I could have done differently. In college, I didn’t get into the computer science department. That killed me. Then it lingered for a lot longer than it should have. At a certain point I realized how grateful I was for experiences and people in my life. If I went back, I might not have them. Not that I wouldn’t be happy. My major example is that I don’t think I would have ended up in New York. I think I’ve experienced more and learned more living here than I would have if I took a different route.

Everyone also worries about the future to some extent. The key is to recognize that you’re worrying then identify what you have control over. If there aren’t steps you can take to improve the situation, then it’s probably out of your control and, again, that energy can be applied positively elsewhere.

I’ve been better about being present in the past couple years. It’s important and building better relationships and in focusing on work. I haven’t entirely stopped time traveling, but I try to make sure it’s the positive kind. If it’s negative time traveling, I think of what I’m grateful for or I figure out what I can do right now.

I appreciate that Altucher doesn’t proclaim he’s a guru or anything like that. His suggestion is to see other have done, including himself, and take the lessons from that. Then try them out yourself to see what works.

The Miracle of Morning Pages

Before I started the 100 posts in 100 days project, I was experimenting with morning pages for writing every day. I found it really good, but it could take a while. I didn’t read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but I bought the supplement: The Miracle of Morning Pages. My biggest takeaways from this were that the rules are more strict than most people usually following it do.

First thing upon waking up

You want to capture your monkey mind immediately. The intention isn’t to create new content that’s shared with people. The real reason to do morning pages is to get the junk out of your head to generate clarity. The content isn’t the point, the practice is.

Longhand

Cameron stresses the importance of doing morning pages longhand. Longhand translation to actual words differs of course, but it’s safe to say you’d fit more per page when typing. If you type your morning pages and actually get to three typed pages, that’s a lot more content than you’d get handwritten. Again, though, the content is the point. So I can see where going longhand could generate completely different results.

Toss them out, burn them, etc.

I struggled with treating morning pages as non-permanent things. I’d never say I’m a minimalist but I’ve always tried to keep clutter down in my apartment. I think it’s a holdover from living in 7 different places my first year in New York. Even if a stay was only a few days or a couple weeks, I still had to move everything.

On the other hand, I’m a digital hoarder. What if something good is in the morning pages? Just let it go? I guess there’s that idea that if it’s really important then you’ll remember it. And that it’s practice in seeing that good ideas aren’t a finite resource. You’ll always think of more.

Absolutely stop when done

You’re supposed to get to 3 pages and stop. No more and no less. It’s enough to get to clarity and move on with your day. That doesn’t mean you have to stop writing entirely. It just means morning pages need to be separate from writing that you do that’s going towards your novel or articles or whatever that may be.

Book note on The Creative Habit: Excuses

In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp shares her journey and gives guidance on building a habit of working on your creativity. One of the key things is getting over some of the fears and excuses you might have for starting and sharing something creative:

  1. People will laugh at me.

  2. Someone has done it before.

  3. I have nothing to say.

  4. I will upset someone I love.

  5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind.

My real fear is that people will cringe when they read things I write. I can deal with people laughing at me. It seems like I’ll have to go through both if I want to learn how to get people to laugh with me.

I’m not the first person to blog, and I’m not even the ten thousandth person to try posting every day. In a lot of cases I know that because I’m pretty much taking the exact same premise or method.

I don’t have a fear of having nothing to say, I’m not even worried that I won’t have anything good to say. I know I won’t have anything good to say on some days. The point of establishing a habit is to to keep working through those days because they’ll add up and I’ll learn to start creating something good.

I’m not too worried about upsetting someone I love. I’m not doing any kind of tell-all and I’m not hiding any of this from anyone. My girlfriend was one of the first people I told about this project and she’s been very supportive. Same with my brother and a couple close friends I’ve shared this project with.

As far as not reaching the expectation I have set in my mind, you can beat that by setting the bar very low. Not a great strategy for long-term goals. The long-term goal is to have a hundred posts in 100 days knowing that will get me a good practice. However, it requires a lower bar for each post. And there has to be some kind of balance. My rule that I’ve stuck pretty close to it is to not have cut out those that are two or three sentences just the post for the sake of posting.

Some days I haven’t had a full hour and it’s not enough time to really polish anything of length. In the future, if I’m writing one-day posts I’ll aim to create shorter posts. Otherwise I’ll take multiple days to give myself time to write something of substance.

Spark Joy

In Spark Joy, Marie Kondo explains further how to apply the principles from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

When I was a kid, my parents would have different levels of clean. The highest for me and my brother to strive for was “party clean”. Aka guests are coming over. We’d clean and clean then tell our dad we were ready for inspection, which we never seemed to pass the first time through. Probably the entire point of the whole thing, looking back.

When cleaning my bedroom, I’d do fine until I hit the pile of Game Players and EGM magazines. If I read Spark Joy back then, I probably would’ve been very confused, then finished cleaning faster, treating magazines like books:

To avoid wasting the entire day reading them, the trick is never to open them. Check for joy by simply touching them.

When I visit my parents’ house, a handful of those videogame magazines are still on the bookshelf. Right below the World Book encyclopedia and the teen and children supplemental books. I’ll have to confirm the next time I’m over, but I’m sure touching them would spark joy.

I really like this tip for dealing with food scraps:

Consequently, my kitchen never smells like raw garbage. So what do I do with the kitchen scraps? I keep them in my freezer. I set aside a corner of the freezer for kitchen scraps and, after thoroughly draining them, I plop any fruit and vegetable peelings, chicken bones, etc., in a bag as I cook. Twice a week, on regular pickup days, I remove the bag of scraps.

I do a C-minus version of this. I don’t usually have much actual food in my freezer so it’s usually just empty containers from Seamless deliveries from the week. Or last two weeks. Or…

Anyway, she also takes labels off of as many things as she can:

The more textual information you have in your environment, the more your home becomes filled with noise.

My pet peeve is when people leave stickers on TVs and laptops. Those would probably drive Kondo up the wall. She takes things a step further by removing labels from laundry detergent and other household bottles.

The book also has some advice for the digital world. In particular, photos:

Since the advent of the digital camera, people take endless photos but rarely look at them more than once.

I took the time to organize my photos and have found that I look at them a lot more. While I can’t bring myself to delete large swaths of photos, I did some organizing locally then uploaded them all to Google Photos.

Probably one of my favorite products1 of the last five years. Can’t recommend it enough if you were like me, used an SLR and other cameras along the way until phones caught up and now you take so many but never want to plug the external hard drive in to look at the old photos.

Until there’s technology to magically handle all the other piles of clutter in life, it might be a good idea to follow some of the guidelines in Spark Joy.

  1. Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer

10% Happier

In 10% Happier, Dan Harris1 tells the story of how he became a regular meditator. He opens by saying his preferred title was “The Voice in my Head is an Asshole”. The best thing about the book is that Harris was probably more skeptical about meditation than most people.

If you told me when I first arrived in New York City, when I started working in network news, that I’d be using meditation to defang the voice in my head, or that I would ever write a whole book about it, I would’ve laughed at you.

Until recently, I thought of meditation as the exclude province of bearded swamis, unwashed hippies, and fans of John Tesh music.

Just in the past couple years since the book was released, meditation has taken further steps toward mainstream. Still, many people who could get the most benefit from meditation dismiss it as “not for them”. Their reasons are the same as Harris’s:

Moreover, since I have the attention span of a six month old yellow lab, I figured it was something I could never do anyway. I assumed, given the constant looping, buzzing, and fizzing of my thoughts, that clearing my mind wasn’t an option.

A lot of times, the busiest knowledge workers (a term I took from Cal Newport—you might be a knowledge worker2 if most of your day is spent at a desk) got so busy by chasing productivity. Those tips and tricks work, and you can do things faster and fit work into smaller spaces, jamming every nook and cranny of the day. There’s no room for ten minutes of seeming inactivity.

What really sold me is the idea that it’s an investment. Time exercising is rarely questioned. We understand the benefits go beyond the time in the gym. The arguments come through choosing what’s best during that time.

So you invest twenty minutes into meditation and reap the benefits through the other hours in the day.

Awful metaphor attempt: let’s start with the jar from that parable about the jar. Filled with rocks and pebbles and sand. Now let’s say the rocks and pebbles and sand are being shot at you. You’ll grab what you can and stuff it in the jar. Meditation lets you practice slowing that down so you can pick and choose what should go in the jar in the first place.

Unconvinced? I would be too at this point. Let’s move on.

Maybe you left this page, went to a better source with more persuasive reasoning for meditation, then you closed that tab and realized this page was still up. Then just maybe you’d give this a glance to see if I had anything on how to meditate. You’re in luck, Harris’s brief explanation of how to meditate is as good as any I’ve read:

Whenever your attention wanders just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking, that’s pretty much impossible. True, when you are focused on the feeling of your breath, the chatter will momentarily cease. But this won’t last too long.

The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath over and over again.

It’s simple, but like many simple things, it isn’t easy. Eat less and workout more while you’re at it. And like many things that aren’t easy, it’s worth it.

Despite its difficulties, though, meditation did offer something huge: an actual method for shutting down the monkey mind, if only for a moment. It was like tricking the furry little gibbon, distracting it with something shiny so it would sit still.

If you practice sitting still, the monkey mind will do the same.


  1. Harris is the best narrator I’ve heard in an audiobook. He’s a news anchor that’s worked at the top level. It was one of the first audiobooks I listened to. ↩︎
  2. You might be a redneck knowledge worker if… the sticker on your Aeron chair says “My other chair’s in a John Deere”. You also might be working for a startup in 1999, where these jokes would be more comfortable bombing. ↩︎

You are a Writer

In You are a Writer, Jeff Goins explains why you should call yourself a writer. He then explains the area to make sure you’re backing up your words.

I’ve always and still do shy away from titles. There’s still a tiny twinge when I say I’m a designer. I felt it just now. This might have to do with having worked at a fashion company. “Designer” with nothing else in front meant you were designing clothes—which was the core business.

I think I’d all out cringe if I said I’m a writer. But I enjoyed all the guidance on walking the walk. If I’m learning anything in this 100 days, 100 posts project, it’s learning how to finish. Jeff writes about finishing:

Cancel all backup plans, pick a project, and move forward. It doesn’t matter what you pick. Maybe it’s a book, an article, or whatever. Write it. And finish it. Because once you learn how to finish, you’ll be able to start again. You’ll start another great project and finish it. And another. And another.

In the first few weeks of this project, I’d get almost to the end of a post but didn’t want to do the grunt work. With a list of future post ideas, it was easy to start working on the next post. That’s also more fun.

Something else I need to improve on is editing. I knew that from the start of this project, and I still haven’t improved as much as I want here. Jeff talks about the importance of editing:

Let’s face it: The “genius” stuff happens in the editing process. Most successful writers go through a tedious process of drafting and shaping their content to get something worth sharing. How do they do this? They write every day. They write a thousand terrible words to find a hundred words worth using. They share their work with a close friend. They edit, tweak, and then ship. But they have to have something to start the process with. And so do you.

I’m getting pretty good at generating a bunch of raw material. I can get to two crappy pages faster, but they’re still crappy pages. Still, it’s improvement. If I can get the marble at the quarry quicker than I’ll have more chances to practice chipping away at it to make shapes. Eventually I’ll learn to make statues.

One of the important things is getting to the quarry in the first place. Here’s Jeff on creating that raw material:

Commit to writing something—anything—today. Maybe it’s just a sentence or a title. But get it on paper (or screen). Write it just to get it out. Right. Now. You might have a nugget of something that was inspired at 3 a.m. But write free. Keep your fingers moving.

It might feel like a waste, but it works: Write more, so you can edit more. Starting with raw thoughts then slicing down your fluff to the core essentials is how you get to genius.

I’m also practicing showing up. Professionals show up. Not that my aim is to be a professional writer, but if I want to improve then I need to show up. Professionals do it in the open:

They practice in public. They show up, every day, without excuse or complaint (okay, maybe some complaint). They perform. They go to work. They stop stalling and playing around and actually get stuff done. Writing is no different. Look, it’s easy to dump words on a page and tuck it away in a drawer. But to be a real writer, you have to take some risks. You have to put your work out there. Throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks.

I’m getting better at throwing things against the wall every single day. Soon, and slowly, I’ll work on making things stick.

Book note on Spoiled Brats: Write lots of jokes

I finished reading Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich. (A couple weeks ago I finished The Last Girlfriend on Earth.) All of this was after listening to his appearance on The James Altucher show. James mentioned that he rarely laughs out loud while reading and Simon’s books got him laughing.

I laughed multiple times while reading The Last Girlfriend on Earth and the same thing happened reading Spoiled Brats. Each of the best stories from the books are available online at The New Yorker:

  • Unprotected: This is written from the perspective of a condom

  • Sell Out: A pickle-factory worker is brined in 1912 and pulled out a century later, where he gets to meet his great-great-great grandson.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth is about love and relationships. Spoiled Brats is mostly about destroying millennials. The stories are absurd and completely relatable. It’s an amazing combination that I imagine is difficult to pull off as a writer.

One of my favorite parts of Spoiled Brats was the interview at the end. (That interview happens to be online also.) He’s worked at a very very high level in professional comedy writing: SNL, Pixar, a weekly TV show, and of course these these short stories published in The New Yorker. It’s encouraging to see Simon say that what he does can be learned.

Even the most experimental abstract expressionists have to stretch a canvas, right? I mean, there’s a lot of technical busywork that goes into the construction of any creative medium. But it’s learnable. It’s not that hard. I’ve got about five or ten rules of thumb that I keep in my brain as I’m writing.

It’s encouraging because comedy is a field that people probably thinks comes naturally. Everyone has a few funny friends in mind and it just seems natural to them. But writing it down and working it over and over to make sure it’s funny to a wider audience is hard. You have to work at it:

I occasionally will suddenly have an idea out of nowhere—in the stereotypical Hollywood way, inspiration will strike—but that probably accounts for 5 or 10 percent of all my published work. The rest is the result of brute force.

He writes every day and generates a lot of material that doesn’t make it to the final piece:

How many pages do you think you wrote that didn’t end up in the final piece?

Oh, hundreds. But that’s typical for me. I throw out most of what I write. But percentage-wise, what I kept for “Sell Out” was definitely the lowest.

Like many other crafts, you create and create and most of it gets tossed until you’re left with something good.

I’m writing 100 posts in 100 days—I don’t expect any to be good yet. A few feel okay. And that’s fine, as long as I’m improving. Compared to when I started, I’m more disciplined and actually finish posts before starting new ones. I learned how important this was to make sure I don’t get buried in unfinished drafts.

Book note on Originals

In Originals, Adam Grant talks about creating many ideas to get to the good ideas1:

“Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”

It reminded me of the story of the pottery class being graded either on 1.) quantity of completed pieces or 2.) quality of a single final piece. I don’t know where I originally read it. It might have been from Jason Kottke or Derek Sivers.

My best guess, though is that I read it on Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood blogged about the story from the book Art & Fear. Digging into his other posts, he gives some advice on blogging consistently:

My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing.

As for subjects, Jeff tried to avoid blogging about blogging:

I’ve avoided the incestuous nature of blogging about blogging until now […]

I haven’t!

Thinking of it as a single quantity/quality scale doesn’t quite work. I can’t arbitrarily move to the quality end—I’m not a good enough writer. More time spent on the quantity side lets me slowly get further on the quality side.

There’s a better metaphor, but feel free to read this bad one. Let’s say you arrive at a canyon. One side is quantity and the other is quality. At first you spend most of your time in the quantity end to gather materials. Once in a while, you’ll build part of the bridge out toward quality. And you can get further and further out to the quality side, but it still requires quantity. As the bridge goes out, you can then pick and choose exactly where you want to spend your time.

I’ll continue chopping trees down on this side of the canyon.

  1. This excerpt is pretty much a quote from someone else.

Anything You Want

Derek Sivers’s book notes have been priceless for me. I used his recommendations for guidance a lot in the past few years. Learning how he processes books he reads led me to highlight a lot more. I’ve always wanted to publish notes for all (or most of) the books I read to make the material more meaningful for myself. They do take time (and that’s sort of the point), but I’m starting to work through my backlog of highlights.

In Anything You Want, Derek tells different stories from building CD Baby and explains what he learned. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from Derek’s book.

You can’t pretend there’s only one way to do it. Your first idea is just one of many options.

This is important in my work as a designer, and something I need to improve on. A lot of times it’s easy to just think the first idea is the best idea without taking more time to explore. In doing Crazy 8s, something always comes out of that 6th, 7th, or 8th sketch. It might not be used for the problem at hand. It might just be a germ of an idea. But it’s valuable. This goes beyond sketching and design—it’s important to set aside time to consider other ideas for any problem.

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?

This isn’t a business. Why am I really trying to write? I want to improve. Am I helping people? Not yet, but I think there will eventually be good lessons worth sharing here. Am I profitable? Well, I’m making zero from this right now but maybe the skills will translate to something that can generate passive income.

When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand.

I’ve learned so much trying to do things myself. I heard something recently that reminded me there’s also a balance. It can be easy to tell people “Oh but I like doing these things.” Sometimes there’s fun stuff to learn but there’s other things you can spend time on that would be even more fun to learn.

You’ll notice that as my company got bigger, my stories about it were less happy. That was my lesson learned. I’m happier with five employees than with eighty-five, and happiest working alone.

I’ve been around startups in their earliest stages. I’ve seen that stress. I’ve seen struggles founders go through. WIth a few years of separation, I’ve seen some become very successful and some that have failed.

The title suggests having anything you want. I really like the overall lessons: running a gigantic company might not actually be what you want. It’s not for me1.

  1. Fully acknowledging that it’s not like that’s exactly an option for me right at this moment. I can see how some people would actually want it and don’t just want the financial freedom attached to it. They want to be in charge of something big with a lot of moving parts. If that’s the case, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Warren Buffet’s goals

In Grit, Angela Duckworth says grit has two components: passion and perseverance. Gritty people are passionate about things that take years to achieve. That helps them through the sub-goals, some of which can be a grind.

Having a top-level goal with no low and mid-level goals can lead to frustration. It’s believing in overnight success.

Having low-level and mid-level goals with no top-level goal leads to early passion for a project and quick disinterest. The next shiny new thing will pull you away. It’s totally fine for some things, like jumping from hobby to hobby recreationally. Professionally, though, it can be detrimental because it’s hard to grow career capital if you’re jumping from thing to thing.

Angela describes a top-level goal setting technique attributed to Warren Buffet (though it seems similar to Seinfeld getting credit for marking X’s on a calendar).

  • Write the 25 things you want to achieve in your career

  • Circle the 5 most important

  • You’ve now identified your 20 biggest career distractions

It’s a lesson in focus. Angela adds a few extra steps:

  • From the 25, identify the items that lead to a common goal

  • You’ve now identified your top-level goals

I really like these extra steps. It reminds me of blobs combining to form bigger blobs that then absorb smaller blobs until you see your top-level goals to focus on.

Where does writing daily fit in? Some posts come easier than others or are more fun to write. Collectively I think it’s helping me become a better writer and helping me focus. Being a better writer helps with organizing thoughts and telling better stories.

What top-level goal does this lead to? I’ll think about it, because right now I’m demonstrating early passion that I hope isn’t followed by lead to quick disinterest.

Quitting

One Grit chapter covers raising gritty children. Angela’s household has a “Hard thing” rule:

  1. Everyone, including mom and dad, has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice.

  2. You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other natural stopping point has arrived. You can’t quit on a bad day.

  3. You get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you.

It reminds me of something I heard on a podcast1. The example was editing audio. There are people trying to build platforms and they want to be audio engineers and editors for themselves. It takes a lot of time. Their argument is that they like doing it. Fair point, but it’s also taking up time that could be spent on something more important for their business or on something they enjoy more that’s completely recreational.

There’s a balance, of course. Angela Duckworth gives two examples of things she’s quit: piano and French. Piano didn’t come easy to her and she wasn’t very interested in it. Easy to drop. Dropping French was more interesting, because she found it interesting and she was picking it up quickly. Why stop? Because it was still taking up time.

Less time spent on piano and French freed up time for pursuits I found more gratifying. Finishing up whatever you begin without exception is a good way to miss opportunities to start different, possibly better things.

Applying this to my 100 Days, 100 Posts project, I don’t feel like quitting right now. I’m enjoying it so far. Some days I’m not in the mood to write. It’s fine, I try writing anyway. But you can’t quit on a bad day.

The natural stopping point will be 100 days. Halfway through, it’s fulfilling and I don’t see that changing in the second half.

After 100 days, I definitely want to keep making things every day. I’ll continue writing in some form. Publishing daily might not be quite as important. Trying to write, re-write, and edit in an hour or two each day means I’ll either 1.) write very short things or 2.) skip some steps. Taking the blocks of time I can squeeze into 2 or 3 days should allow me to go through the revision process. That’s where I’ll be able to improve.

Right now, there are times where I don’t edit. Editing and rewriting is the hard part of writing. That’s where deliberate practice comes in. Writing freely and blasting through a first draft is where you can enter flow. If I skip editing then I don’t think I’m getting better at writing.

I’m getting better at posting daily, which is a useful skill to have. It means I’m able to think about something to write about, write about it, then go through the logistics of adding links and images, then sharing it.

All of those things are useful but I want to edit and think more about the structure and paragraphs and sentences and words. (And to stop writing about writing.)

Right now isn’t the natural stopping point, so I’m going to keep posting daily.

  1. I need to deliberately practice remembering my sources.

Hard work beats talent

I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Grit over the past week. I finished it once and have started listening a second time through. I haven’t written book notes for an audiobook before. I’ll try to write 2 or 3 posts based on Grit. Here’s the first.

In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth writes about the importance of grit in life. She explains why grit is something worth striving for and suggests how to build grit.

One concept discussed, of course, is deliberate practice. She shares this quote from a basketball player, “I probably spend 70 percent of my time by myself, working on my game, just trying to fine tune every single piece of my game.”

There’s a section about deliberate practice and flow. Some think the two concepts are at odds with each other. Her take is that deliberate practice is for improving skills. Flow is for performance.

I remember reading about the same basketball player a few years back. Something I remember sticking out was that he avoided pickup games when he was younger. For a lot of people, pickup games are all they do, so it’s both practice and performance. And probably bad forms of either one.

I looked around and found some of the things his coach made him do instead of playing pickup games. It sounds an awful lot like deliberate practice:

He made the boy write basketball essays, diagram the mechanics to jump shots and told him to memorize a quote that has shaped his life: Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

That player, of course, is recent nWo member Kevin Durant. That excerpt is from the Seattle Times, a few months before the Sonics (RIP) drafted him. Some more from the same article:

Brown forbade Durant from playing pickup games or scrimmaging. He stressed conditioning and an array of shooting, dribbling, passing and defensive drills. Every day was boot camp. Brown taught Durant three basic moves — a pull-up jump shot, a two-dribble jumper and a baseline drive — that formed the foundation of Durant’s repertoire.

On the other side of that memorized quote: hard work meets talent and now you have Kevin Durant.

As far as how this applies to writing, I’m not sure what the performance would be for a writer. You’re rarely watched during the writing process. Maybe it’s just that you aren’t watched during your performance, because you can certainly enter a flow state while writing. It’s probably what Malcolm Gladwell means when he describes the actual writing as blissful.

The thinking and organizing and editing is the hard part. That’s the deliberate practice.

Write Every Day

In Write Every Day: How to Write Faster, and Write More, Cathy Yardley discusses different strategies to implement when establishing a writing routine. As usual with writing books, it’s targeted toward novelists1. Here are some of my highlights.

if you talk about something, it’s a dream… if you schedule it, it’s real.

I didn’t tell many people about this goal to write 100 posts in 100 days2. I also didn’t have a schedule my first few weeks. I had a post where I thought “oh just gotta fix a link and write the last few sentences”. Which was fine. But then a bunch of them piled up and I needed to track things.

I also didn’t really have a good place to store ideas. And had a handful of posts I knew I wanted to write ‘next’. Then I’d jump around between them or just get decision fatigue. With the schedule, I know what posts to focus on that day. And I can rest easy knowing that the others are somewhere in the future.

it takes approximately five finished manuscripts under your belt to gain a workable competency.

Workable competency. That’s a good way to put it. I’d love to be workably competent. Even at a very good pace, writing every day and finishing a manuscript every six months, that’s still 2.5 years. If I keep this pace up, I’ll hit workable competency around post #900.

By the end of this project, I worry that instead of having the experience of writing 100 posts, I’ll really have written my first post 100 times. With no improvement between the first and the last. That might actually be the case because I’m not revising and revising and revising and thinking hard to say things in fewer words.

On the other hand, I’m sure the 100th post will come easier and be a little more organized on the first pass. it’ll hopefully be slightly, slightly less *](http://franciscortez.com/two-crappy-pages/)[crappy*.

You don’t get a chance to write until you set the container. It creates a commitment, and it helps you get control of your day, rather than being at the mercy of it.

Something I enjoyed during my short stint with Morning Pages is the rule that you stop after three pages. No more and no less. You finish and move on with your day.

Early on, I was writing longer posts and not finishing things each day. In trying to fix that, I’ve been looking to split posts up if they get too long. I’ve adjusted too far on the other end so sometimes I’ve split a topic too small and don’t really have enough to say for something to stand alone.

Setting the container and moving that container to a specific time in the day makes things real. It reminds me of Cal Newport setting a flexible schedule for deep work.

“SMART” goals. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Bound.

Stretch and ‘SMART’—these two types of goals were my biggest takeaways from Charles Duhigg’s Smarter, Better, Faster. Making a conscious effort to set both has helped. The stretch goal is having a successful blog3. Here’s the breakdown for one of the ‘SMART” goals:

  • Specific: Finish 100 posts in 100 days.
  • Measurable: A post is ‘finished’ when it’s online. I learned a few weeks in that some posts felt ‘finished’ in Google Docs but there were still some stray links and images to add. Then they built up and I was about 85% done with a dozen posts. Meaning none of them were finished.
  • Attainable: I’m currently on pace. I got in the hole early so am having to do a couple weeks with two posts each day.
  • Time bound: 100 days.
  1. I wonder if there’s a giant pool of people reading books like these for NanoWriMo and things like that.
  2. I told my girlfriend. I told some friends I’m trying to write. That’s pretty much it.
  3. Though it took a few weeks to realize, oh, I’m blogging. And I’m still not completely sure what it will be about by the end of it. Though it’s starting to seem like it’s about writing and reading.

Technical Blogging

In Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence, Antonio Cangiano shares his knowledge about setting up, running, and marketing a technical blog. There are good sections on creating good content that can apply to any sort of blog.

I’ve accepted that this 100 Posts, 100 Days project I have is, well, a blog. I thought it’d be good to read up on how I can approach this if I look at it as a blog. Here are some excerpts I enjoyed.

After picking the main topic, jot down a list of ten articles you could write for your blog.

Again, I think it’d be good to think of themes to write about and how they might break down into posts. Ten is a lot though.

What’s the reason your blog exists? Why did you start it in the first place? What’s your compelling story?

This question is way too deep. Because I want to exist? But it’s a good refresher. Why am I doing this in the first place? I wanted to be a better writer. I’ve been successful before when writing regularly. The things I wrote about opened doors in my career. I’d like to continue that.

Your goal is to make it just as obvious, to yourself first and then to readers, why your blog is worth following.

It’d be worth following because other people are probably trying to start writing habits of their own. And they aren’t novelists. It’d be good to take the Ben Orenstein and Sandi Metz idea of spreading the benefits of speaking at conferences, but for blogging. Ben also says blogging is important for capturing your beginner’s mind.

I can help someone.

I know it’s a long way off, but eventually it’d be good for this to also be funny. Because everyone likes the guy who’s trying too hard to be funny.

Write down goals for your blog. What do you want to get out of the blog you are starting? What do you expect from it in one month, three months, a year, three years?

  • One month: Learn to enjoy writing, build the habit (I think I’m here now.)
  • Three months: This will be around 100 posts. Seth Godin says you should find ten people to share with first. At this point I’d like to have, say, my first 3 or 4.
  • One year: 150 posts? After hitting 100 posts I’d like to keep a weekly publishing schedule. The value of one weekly post would have to exceed the value of the 5 posts. I also need to define “value” in some measurable way.
  • Three years

Right now I’m trying to review all the past books I’ve read through and highlighted to build up a set of book notes. A year from now it’d be great to write book notes once per week and a link collection once per week.

After picking the main topic, jot down a list of ten articles you could write for your blog. You don’t need to write the actual articles yet, just the titles. When you are done with this task, ask yourself whether doing this exercise left you excited or frustrated. Was it hard to come up with ten titles, or could you have kept going for ages? The main point of this exercise is to understand if you have enough to say about the topic at hand.

I’m learning that I’m not good at estimating how much I have to say about different topics. Sometimes it seems like things are going to spill out of my head, only to get stumped a couple paragraphs in. Other times I’ll be slow to start on an idea that seems like it might be a dud. Then I get into it and a few pages later I’m wondering if I should split it into multiple posts.

I’ll try this exercise out to see if I can pick a good theme to focus five posts on for a week. If I can think of ten titles then I might be able to write five posts and maybe one will be good.

I can start with a comparison of photography and writing. Before digital tools you had fewer shots at things. Now we can just fire away and post as we please. There are pros and cons to this. I need to focus on how to take advantage of digital convenience without falling in its traps.

Create lists of products (e.g., 5 Books Every Agile Developer Should Read). They can be cheesy or downright good advice. Opt for the latter.

Thank you for reading part one of my series: 5 Books Every Writer Writing 100 Posts in 100 Days Should Read.

Mindless Eating

In Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink explains food habits people have and suggests ways to eat better. A lot of the book focuses a lot on eating less: “Cutting out our favorite foods is a bad idea. Cutting down on how much of them we eat is mindlessly do-able.” This keeps things practical because that’s the most immediately relatable concept. Assuming people eat a lot of bad food, getting the total amount down is a good first step. Then you can focus on quality and replacing bad food with good. Finally, you can earn the right to inconvenience your friends with your odd orders. Then take it one step further and share your thoughts on food.

It reminds me of 59 Seconds, where Richard Wiseman boils a bunch of research down to straightforward suggestions. Which, all, in turn reminds me of Derek Sivers’s “Just tell me what to do” directives approach.

Here are some of my highlights.

Simply thinking that a meal will taste good can lead you to eat more. You won’t even know it happened.

Not completely related, but it’s so rare now that I’ll eat somewhere without looking things up on Yelp. And then I end up liking everything. I like good food and am not picky. This means you should never ask me for food recommendations. I like everything. Since I think everything will taste good, I eat more of everything. Not a good combination.

Most diets are deprivation diets. We deprive ourselves or deny ourselves of something—carbohydrates, fat, red meat, snacks, pizza, breakfast, chocolate, and so forth. Unfortunately, deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against them; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.

That’s enough reasons for me to believe, and it’s easiest to change your environment. 59 Seconds has some eating tips also and suggests a very straightforward environment change: Put a mirror in your kitchen.

The more you think of something, the more of it you’ll eat.

Going through a paleo phase, one of the takeaways that stayed with me is the initial kitchen purge. You’ll eat what’s in there, period. I still don’t keep many snacks around. The brain is too strong and too dumb.

The bottom line: We all consume more from big packages, whatever the product.

In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.

Here’s where we can start replacing low quality with high quality food.

A smart strategy is never to have more than two items on your plate at any one time. You can go back if you’re still hungry, but the lack of variety slows you down, and you end up eating less.

Variants of this conversation are happening at every buffet in America:

“I want to eat until I feel like garbage.”

“It’s gonna be awesome.”

At times, Mindless Eating seems like it’s explaining how to deceive your brain. Sometimes, that’s what’s needed because we’re idiots. If, like me, you don’t believe in yourself, check the book out..

I didn’t have the time to link to this elegantly, but I’d like to point people toward Bill Barnwell’s article about his own weight loss: The Easiest Way to Lose 125 Pounds is to Gain 175 Pounds. It’s the best health article I’ve read in the last few years.

Creative Confidence

In, Creative Confidence, Tom Kelley and David Kelley talk about creativity and how effective design thinking can be in traditionally non-creative fields. Here are some excerpts I enjoyed.

In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.

I used to listen to the Dave Dameshek podcast a lot. One of his catchphrases and audio drops was “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.” My brother and I used to have incredible trouble saying we were wrong. Then one day it changed. I decided to make an effort to identify when I’m about to argue about something for the sake of not being wrong (when I know I’m wrong).

Being afraid of failure is similar. Sometimes it prevents people from starting in the first place. Or from admitting failure and fighting too long to save a sinking ship.

With prototypes, you go in with failure in mind. You test a prototype and see where things failed. The key is failing at a planned time and knowing there’s a chance to learn and fix it before it really counts.

The question hung in the air for a moment before Yo-Yo Ma delivered the bad news to Erik. Long after ascending to the top of his field, Yo-Yo Ma continues to practice as much as six hours a day.

DJ Q-Bert was a hero of mine in middle school, because I liked the idea of being a DJ. I saved up for turntables and then sort of expected to be a DJ, but I didn’t understand that it would take practice. DJ Q-Bert has been world class in his art.

One day hanging out with friends, a waitress let us know that some DJ was performing a set across the street at Turntable Lab. We went across the street and there he was, DJ Q-Bert. Someone asked what he did to practice. Did? I still practice every day.

Karaoke confidence, like creative confidence, depends on an absence of fear of failure and judgment.

There should be a book about Karaoke confidence. I’ve been part of my fair share of Karaoke nights. K-Town has a lot of places where you can book smaller rooms with friends to sing you heart out. Fear of failure and judgment can’t get past those doors. This is where you work out the moves. It’s the paper prototype.

There are other Karaoke places. The ones without rooms. The places where you sing in front of the entire bar. While people play pool and your goal is to at least have them look up. It’s the beta.

The analogy falls apart here. You can prototype things and then eventually release something to the real world based on iterations of that prototype. Professional singers probably don’t get their reps in various Karaoke lounges.

“Think of today as a prototype. What would you change?”

I thought this was great. I’m a designer in tech, so prototypes are a known concept to people I work with. After reading Creative Confidence, I started noticing prototypes and iteration in other fields. Even if they’re not calling it prototyping. Storyboards for filmmakers. Test kitchens and soft openings for chefs. Open mics for stand-up comedians. Situational drills for sports. Labbing in virtual sports like Madden. The list goes on and on.