Category: Finding Your Voice

Today’s my birthday! And on my birthday, I pray. (Which is hilarious to imagine, if you know me.) I pray for my well-being, and I pray for bliss; I pray for fulfillment, and I pray for rapture. I pray for meaning and I pray for pleasure; I pray for substance and I pray for intellect. I pray that every day I’ll yearn for the world more, not less, and that every choice I make will make me cutthroat ravenous. How

“Oh, but they’re going to say ________________________.” That I’m not really as smart as I think I am.That I think I’m better than them, now.That I’m putting on a show. Good news: you can stop micro-managing all the thoughts that don’t belong to you, darling. Their thoughts belong to them, just like their children do. You would not swoop in and try to tell their little Johnny what he should believe about God. Similarly, you do not have to tell

Fun is underrated. We spend so much of our lives trying to get taken seriously, that fun becomes something we think of as shameful, dirty; something to be minimized in a professional setting. Giggles are juvenile; jokes are adolescent; anything more than a poker face threatens your status as “a respectable professional.” But that’s only because we mistake seriousness for professionalism. That grouchy fucking face doesn’t make anyone look legitimate; it makes you look unenthusiastic. The truth is, you either

Stop giving a shit about the stats. So you don’t have any subscribers? Who cares—you don’t need subscribers to put your best work out into the world. You don’t even need a website. Just start. Surprise—I’ve had a few thousand people unsubscribe since I started doing daily emails. Guess what? I’m doing it, anyway, full speed ahead. I’m doing them because the integrity of my work demands it. A writer writes—and it’s none of my business who is reading. It’s

What do you believe? That you’ll pull it off? Or that you’ll inevitably fail? Both are right. But only one will make you rich*.       *Interpret that word as you may.

“That’s the exception, not the rule,” is a tragic piece of advice. As any leader knows, “be the exception, not the rule,” is how leaders are born in the first place.

Yesterday I talked about change—and it’s no coincidence. I’m making some big changes myself, given that a lot of things are coming to an end, right now. Because iteration is what we’re all doing, every single day, even if it blows by us going 100mph down the freeway. (In a red Ferrari, smoking a cigar, with a license plate that reads: TOOFAST4U.) We iterate as we breathe; we iterate every time we exercise; we iterate every time we learn something

  Alright, real talk: It’s 4:27am and there should be laws against writing at these hours. Is this what drunk driving feels like? Because I’m pretty sure my eyes are doing cartwheels and my brain is like, “What the ****?” and all the while my stomach is all, LISTEN LADY IF WE’RE DOING THIS I’M GONNA NEED SOME ASSISTANCE DOWN HERE. I mean, I normally wouldn’t mind dragging a bag of Doritos into bed with me at this hour (it’s