creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

When you put your work out into the world, you have to be ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

“If you want a happy ending,” actor Orson Welles wrote, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American life,” but if you look around you’ll notice that not only are there second acts, there are third, fourth, and even fifth ones. (If you’re reading the obituaries

How can you show your work even when you have nothing to show? The first step is to scoop up the scraps and the residue of your process and shape them into some interesting bit of media that you can share. You have to turn the invisible into something other people can see.

Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything. There’s a big, big difference between sharing and over-sharing.

remember what writer Colin Marshall says: “Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide.” If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.

It’s very important to separate your work from the rest of your life. As my wife said to me, “If you never go to work, you never get to leave work.”

The beauty of owning your own turf is that you can do whatever you want with it. Your domain name is your domain. You don’t have to make compromises. Build a good domain name, keep it clean, and eventually it will be its own currency. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are.

“When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it—how much they like it, how valuable it is—is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.”