it focused on what was timeless about timely events.

You can’t make something that lasts if it’s based on things, on individual parts that themselves won’t last, or if it’s driven by an amateur’s impatience.

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.

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.

You must create room for the audience to inhabit and relate to the work. You must avoid the trap of making this about you—because, remember, you won’t be the one buying it. In that way, Robert’s insistence on diversity wasn’t coming only from his very real sense of fairness and tolerance. There was a genius business logic to his choices as well:

A book should be an article before it’s a book, and a dinner conversation before it’s an article. See how things go before going all in.

it can be made piece by piece—or, as Anne Lamott put it in her meditation on writing, “bird by bird.”

We’re all selling ideas. Whatever the form, the process is the same. And if we get really good at it and we think about it the right way, our idea can sell forever, an infinite number of times. That’s the dream. To matter, to reach, to last. So let’s go get it.

It’s also a cautionary warning to me against telling myself I am “done” too early. I want to prolong that introspective review phase. Because it may just save me from finding out my project was dead on arrival come launch day.