Sterling Proffer
@sterling
Sterling Proffer
Some of the most prolific figures in literature, math, and science spent only four-to-five ours doing their most creative and profound work. The rest of the time, they focused their attention on spending time with family and friends and taking advantage of rest as much as possible. In short, creative productivity is not based on the number of hours... See more
William Ballard • Only 4 Hours of Creative Power
Identify the set of things that you love to do and that you do well. You don’t need to be the best in the world at something. People often succeed because they have a set of various skills that don’t normally go together.
Adam Davidson • The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century
h/t Nick Susi
Once you have hypotheses for who is successful and why they are successful, you can hypothesize possible adjacent users segments. This will involve changing one or more of the vectors that you identified.
Bangaly Kaba • The Adjacent User Theory
What artists really need, writes Amy Whitaker in Art Thinking, “is not to be paid to make the things they already know how to make, but to somehow find space inside their financials to play and take risks to develop the next thing.”
William Deresiewicz • The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech
Search engines, social networks, content platforms, publications with influence, word of mouth—none of them work unless people engage and amplify. That “amplification” looks very different from channel to channel, of course. In word of mouth, it’s literally whether someone talks or types about you. With publications, it’s whether their editor(s)... See more