Agalia Tan

A good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters

Great strategy isn’t about working forwards from backward-looking data in the form of numbers. It’s about working backwards from forward-looking data in the form of ideas.

Over the past ten years, media companies have responded to their loss of audience by creating “viral” editorial that performs well inside the platform’s engagement-at-all-costs ecosystem. Predictably, however, quality editorial – the context journalists create for a living – rarely qualifies as viral.

Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.

Forget about the outcome and focus on what precedes it.

Am I putting myself in good positions and creating the conditions for success?

People read nonfiction to learn and to feel. My framework for ensuring a blog post accomplishes both is to start with a first draft that focuses on "novel" ideas.

A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile . I've identified five categories:

• Counter-intuitive —

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