Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

These words of Steven Pressfield in his wonderful book The War of Art are a haunting and humbling reminder: “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Our goal here is to make something that people rave about, that becomes part of their lives. The buried insights found in those other great works were not put there on the first pass. Work is unlikely to be layered if it is written in a single stream of consciousness. No. Deep, complex work is built through a relentless, repetitive process of revis

In fact, to be properly controversial—as opposed to incomprehensible—you must have obsessively studied your genre or industry to a degree that you know which boundaries to push and which to respect.

The higher and more exciting standard for every project should force you to ask questions like this: What sacred cows am I slaying? What dominant institution am I displacing? What groups am I disrupting? What people am I pissing off?

most customers won’t get excited about a moderate improvement—because most people don’t even care.

They’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole, they’ve lost sight of the fact that 90 percent of users are perfectly happy with the dominant player in the space they are trying to occupy, whether it’s Facebook or The Catcher in the Rye.

So the creator of any project should try to answer some variant of these questions: What does this teach? What does this solve? How am I entertaining? What am I giving? What are we offering? What are we sharing? In short: What are these people going to be paying for?

For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE.

You don’t have to be a genius to make genius—you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.