Why Creatives Will Win by Thinking Small

A lot of times, instead of thinking big, we actually need to think small. Instead of getting hyped about broad narratives that explain our predicament, we need to just buckle down and ask ourselves how we can do what we’re already doing—but much, much better. We need to focus on execution, not strategy.

It’s generally much easier to be a creator today than ever.

But there’s one big reason I don’t envy the people getting started in their online-solopreneur-creating-things journey today:

Expectations.

I’ve been doing this for about a decade, and when I started, it was significantly harder to build an audience.

There were no highly optimized entertain... See more

Substack isn’t the only player that has sought to figure out small-scale publishing in the platform dominance era. Medium, for instance, has been home to a rotating roster of small publications, but has pivoted often and failed to emerge as the media force many once hoped it would be. Best said Substack’s main focus is the connection between an ind... See more

There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can p... See more

The more stories I hear about how companies succeed or stagnate, the more I realize that it’s extremely common for creative founders (also known as “idea people”) to have a persistent bias towards seeing everything as a strategy problem, even when it’s really an execution problem.