Lisa Dunford Dickman

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how t... See more

Given the above, you might be surprised to learn that until about a year ago I didn’t primarily think of myself as a writer. I thought of myself as a founder who liked to write. About a year ago, I decided to flip that: I started to think of myself as a writer who also builds things.

Personally, writing is not how I analyze how I feel; writing is how I resolve how I feel. I find it deeply cathartic.

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. A failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt. In contrast, many people who are drawn to buy Macintosh computers or Harley-Davidson motorcycles, for example, don’t need to talk to anyone about which brand to choose. They feel the utmost confidence in their decision and the onl

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There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

“I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way? No, no, and no. I a

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