#Things to consider

  • Keep a swipe file. A file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.
  • Your job is to be a good collector of ideas.
  • Nobody is born with a style or a voice. You don’t come preconfigured, and you don’t know who you are. You have to create to figure all that out. You learn by copying your heroes.
  • Copying is a practice. It’s different from plagiarism, which is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. And you steal from all your heroes, not just one. You steal the thinking behind the style, you learn to see like your heroes.
  • You want to internalize your heroes way of looking at the world.
  • Humans are always incapable of making perfect copies.
  • When people give you advice, are they really just talking to themselves in the past?
  • Nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —André Gide
  • You will only be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with. So be a collector and only collect stuff you really love.
  • Copying is about reverse-engineering to figure out how something works.
  • Copy your heroes and find out where you fall short. That’s what you should focus on and transform into your own work.
  • Do the work you want to see done.
  • Step away from the screen. Knowledge work can seem abstract behind the screen. The computer is good for editing and publishing your work. But it’s not good for generating ideas. Go for a walk. Work the ideas in your head. Keep away from the computer until it’s time to edit.
  • Take time to be bored.
  • Don’t worry about a unified vision for your work. Keep all of yourself. Just keep spending time with the things you love. They will start talking to each other and then interesting things will happen. One day, you will look back and it will all make sense.
  • Having a container can inspire us to fill it. Whenever I’ve become lost over the years, I just look at my website and ask myself, “What can I fill this with?”
  • Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
  • Keep a praise file.
  • The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture.
  • Remember the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time.
  • Keep a logbook. In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them.