The practice

Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations

1. To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.

2. You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.

3. Small is more rewarding than big -

Part of “good practice” (deep focus, lots of iteration) is having properly-sized feedback loops. Too short a loop, and it subverts the development of voice (too many other voices jutting in, telling you how to be). Too long a loop, and you might lose momentum (some feedback, properly timed, is critical). For me, the daily popup newsletter is a good

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

– Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

To state this again. There are a set of things that excite you artistically, and there are a set of things that the public enjoys, and you are looking for something in the intersection of those two sets. You can make work that is commercially successful while still staying true to your artistic interests.

– fnnch

You’re a slut and a whore for the algorithm. I couldn’t do it anymore. You can never feed it enough. You start out making art, and hoping that the door will open. You’re looking for that viral moment so it opens up the door and you can do the thing full time. But you start to compromise just to get the door to open: guessing what it wants, debasing