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“Have you tried doing less on the problem?” is an underrated strategy to get unstuck. Most people try to do more.

• Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. While writing the intensely confessional My Struggle, Knausgaard forced himself to write five pages a day to overcome his tendency to freeze up in shame. Every time he acclimated to the pace of his writing, he increased the quota so he would always be overwhelmed—at one point he forced himself t

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when Rick Rubin said the audience comes last and art must be your diary on display otherwise it’s not art it’s just commerce …… I felt that

This is a fairly common practice, crafting a ritual where you sit down at the same time every day, in the same chair, writing in the same kind of notebook, creating a repetitiveness that borders on self-hypnosis. This is what Hemingway did, it is what Mario Vargas Llosa does.

If your goal is to create a popular version of a well-established thing, like a pizza parlour, seek plenty of feedback.

If your goal is to create something somewhat novel that still requires stakeholder buy-in, like a tech company, avoid feedback during exploration phases and seek feedback during exploitation phases. Going back to the two opening qu... See more

Time for tinkering, following my curiosity, and reading about things that interest me can feel like “wasting” time but these periods tend to lead to interesting opportunities. This is because it's a way of getting in the flow with my nature and optimizing for energy first. This ends up being a great hack for avoiding starting things you’ll want to ... See more

He writes that the workbook needs to be “so unpresumptuous and undemanding and is intended to sustain like the mellowest woman almost any number of my peculiarities.”

This experience is common in the childhoods of people who go on to do great work, as I have written elsewhere. Nearly everyone who does great work has some episode of early solitary work. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which ... See more