David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.

Posts from the Newsletter Category

LM: #286: Flux capture

October 21, 2024

Nothing is ever finished.

A book is outdated the moment it’s printed. The tech improves before a product is shipped.

The universe is in a constant state of change. Your bananas go bad, a hole wears through your favorite socks, your go-to cereal gets discontinued, and the rotation of the earth is slowing as galaxies grow farther apart.

So to finish a creative project is an unnatural act. Your thoughts, skills, tastes, and the nature of the matter you’re trying to wrangle change. There are a thousand decisions you could’ve made differently, and the moment before you ship they leap out in high relief.

Whenever I “finish” a project, the moment Doc plugged those wires together in Back to the Future comes to mind.

Your challenge as a creator is to grab the loose ends, pull against resistance, and bring them together for just long enough to proclaim, “it is done!”

Then hope lightning strikes.

Aphorism: “In story, we concentrate on that moment…in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism.” —Robert McKee

Book: This is Strategy (Amazon) is Seth Godin’s new guide to making better plans and thinking strategically in a complex world.

Best,
David
P.S. One form of resistance keeping you from finishing is The Finisher’s Paradox.

LM: #285: Black and white and gray

October 14, 2024

Just because you expect it to fail doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build it.

There are three kinds of projects: white swans, black swans, and gray swans.

Black swans have little chance of succeeding. You’re not sure why you’re building it, who it’s for, or how it will turn out.

White swans are nearly certain to succeed. You know exactly why you’re building it, for whom, and how it will turn out.

Gray swans mix together elements of white and black swans. It fits into a clear category, but you’re adding a twist.

If white swans are nearly certain to succeed, why not just build white swans? Here’s why:

Black swans are nearly destined for failure, but there’s a tiny chance they’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams. White swans are likely to succeed, but their potential is limited. Gray swans aren’t as assured of success as white swans, but more so than black swans, yet with more potential than white swans.

White swans fit right into a category. Black swans create new categories. Gray swans are a twist on an existing category.

The white swan is your how-to book. The black swan is your impassioned manifesto, free on ebook. The gray swan is your conceptual self-help book.

The white swan is your corporate training video. The black swan is your immersive choose-your-own-adventure project. The gray swan is your experimental horror flick.

The white swan is your freelance Oracle database consulting. The black swan is your whimsical AI experiment. The gray swan is your SaaS with a few more features than the competitors.

The projects you’re most sure will succeed often have the most mediocre potential. So choose wisely.

Book: Good Work (Amazon) is Paul Millerd’s exploration in redefining work and reclaiming your inner ambition.

Cool: Motion built what we were trying to build at Timeful: an AI-driven calendar that plans your tasks around your schedule.

Best,
David
P.S. The graphic above is from my upcoming book, How to Sell a Book. This week is your last chance to preorder for 10% off.

LM: #284: Beer and failure

October 07, 2024

No matter how much we glamorize failure, it’s not necessary to succeed. But you shouldn’t hate the taste of failure.

Sure, if you hate to fail, it’s possible that motivates you to work really hard to avoid it. The more likely outcome is you don’t try at all.

Failure has a bitter taste, like the first time an adult let you have a sip of beer. But like many bitter flavors, beer included, failure is an acquired taste.

It’s not good to fail, but having failures is a better sign than having none. Because failure is proof of effort and if you aren’t failing you probably aren’t trying to succeed.

Like beer, if you get addicted to the flavor of failure, it will ruin your life. Like beer, some of your most interesting and memorable experiences and even successes will be thanks to having a few too many failures.

Failure. You’ll go far if you have one once in a while.

Aphorism: “Make an effort. Just pure stupid, ‘no idea what I’m doing here’ effort. Effort always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result.” –Jerry Seinfeld

Cool: Virtual Post Mail has for more than a decade provided me with a U.S. address to receive mail and sign up for services.

Best,
David
P.S. I once enumerated my year’s best rejections, and should do it again sometime.

LM: #283: Quit good

September 30, 2024

You’ve got something good. You worked hard for it, and learned a lot.

But at some point good is a burden. It’s a source of comfort. From one perspective, walls of security, from another, a prison.

You can’t see beyond those walls without knocking them down.

If exploring your potential and living an interesting life are important to you, you must quit what’s going good. The chances that you’ve been presented by default the goldfish bowl most-suited to your growth are nil. Even if you’ve made the bowl yourself, they’re low.

You can’t leave what you’ve got for something better. Better doesn’t come unless you’ve cleared the space to build it.

Quit something going well to be free for unknown but better.

Aphorism: “One becomes a painter by painting.” —Vincent van Gogh

Book: Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties (Amazon) is either a trip down memory lane, or a glimpse into the past.

Best,
David
P.S. My new book, How to Sell a Book, is available for preorder at 10% off here (customers outside U.S. here).

LM: #282: Time betwixt

September 23, 2024

More done, less time. That’s the point of time management, in a nutshell.

But the pursuit of more with less leads to perverse incentives. As you get more done with less time, you have more time to fill with more to do.

Doing things quickly and efficiently was how you got extra time, so you must also do these extra things quickly and efficiently.

And you lose sight of why you started managing your time. Wasn’t the point to get what you wanted? Did you want to be more stressed and less happy? Did you want to sleep less, to dream less?

Time management has been taken too far when you feel every moment must be filled with productive action. It’s the spaces between actions that make the actions worthwhile. It’s those spaces between that made you want more with less in the first place.

Use some time efficiently so you can use the rest inefficiently.

Aphorism: “Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.” —William E. Gladstone

Cool: Sweet Home 3D is free open-source software for creating a 3D model of your home, for planning projects.

Best,
David
P.S. In case you didn’t know, I wrote a book called Mind Management, Not Time Management.

LM: #281: Head down, step up

September 16, 2024

You’re not your degree. You’re not your title.

As a creator, you are what you make.

Since what makes others interested is having done something interesting, the work is the network. So the best way to network is with your head down.

Put your head down and make something others will respect. Write a book, or write a blog. Build a company, or a short campaign. Make something tangible others can look at and see that you care about something and have stepped up to do something about it.

When you’re done, people can point to that thing and say:

Big or small, when you make something, you make yourself.

Aphorism: “For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.” —Gustav Flaubert

Book: The Dictators (Amazon) is a side-by-side comparison of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

Best,
David
P.S. Thank you Jim Fitzpatrick for interviewing me on CBT News.

LM: #280: Violently creative

September 09, 2024

I’m a hypocrite.

I hold back in my writing. I hear in my mind the objections of readers about why they can’t commit fully and passionately to a creative life. Their day jobs and kids and sacred evenings watching TV. And I fool myself into thinking I’m writing for them.

Meanwhile, I’ve repeatedly done crazy and weird things to make creativity central to my existence. I’ve spent money originally meant for retirement, turned down lucrative and prestigious job offers, and moved to another country and started from scratch a new life in a new language.

And I’m still such I pussy I think to myself, “Nah, I can’t write that. Norm McNormie can’t dream of taking a pay cut from his $250,000-a-year job.”

Sadly, I’ve been trying to be reasonable so long I can hardly access the passion with which I once could have told you how I really felt about the creative life to end up where I am.

And it bothers me there are others who might live more creatively if only I spoke up and set an example.

For those readers, take my best relay of the faint message I can barely still hear from myself decades in the past.

Be violently creative.

Be passionate and uncompromising about the pursuit of your creativity and curiosity. Bang against and break through barriers that stand in your way and guardrails trying to guide you into what’s considered normal, socially acceptable, or even safe or healthy.

Quit your job. Spend your savings. Abandon your family. Live in the forest. Move to a foreign land. Establish an entirely new identity and disappear from anything you’ve ever known. If the image of your lifeless body face-down in a gutter in some alleyway doesn’t seem as bad as you think it should, so long as you got there by giving your creativity a chance, by all means send yourself down the path you fear might lead you there.

If you’re meant to live the creative life, nothing will stand in your way. The “reasons” of the normal are mere excuses.

This is life. Not a dress rehearsal. Your one chance.

Do things and make sacrifices in the pursuit of your creativity that other people think are crazy, weird, even sick.

Maybe others will think you’re a loser. Maybe you’ll genuinely ruin your life. But at least you gave that gnawing little voice a chance to speak up.

Aphorism: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ―Gustav Flaubert

Book: Eat, Pray, Love (Amazon) is Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir of self-exploration.

Best,
David
P.S. If you have no idea how to get to there from here, Surround and Conquer.

LM: #279: 7 years HTML?

September 02, 2024

Some job posts read: “7 years experience with HTML required,” and that is so confusing.

I have more than twenty-five years of experience with HTML. I haven’t done it every day for twenty-five years. That’s just how long ago I started.

Someone with one year of experience could possibly code faster and cleaner than I.

But even if I had coded HTML every day for twenty-five years, how much better could I be than someone who’s been doing it for one year?

Not much. HTML just isn’t that complicated.

I remember reading something by the guys at Basecamp that, paraphrased, said, “You can’t have seven years HTML experience. You can have one year, seven times.”

With AI tools available to us, the list of things that are complicated is shorter and shorter. There’s no reason you can’t know a little of everything. If you knew no HTML, you could have a short conversation with ChatGPT and have a month’s experience within an hour.

All you need to learn something is a problem to solve, the belief you can learn, and ChatGPT.

Don’t have one year of experience seven times, nor twenty-five. When you get the hang of one thing, learn the next.

Book: How to Be Everything (Amazon) is a guide for “multipotentialites,” or those who (still) don’t know what they want to be when they grow up.

Cool: This 20 Minute Active Recovery Workout is great for the day after lifting.

Best,
David
P.S. If there’s not enough time for everything you want to explore, use Curiosity Management.

LM: #278: “My dog did my homework”

August 26, 2024

Sometimes your dog eats your homework.

If you’re going to be a person who does things, you can’t use that as an excuse. You do your homework again. People who do things know, once you start justifying your failures, you start a vicious cycle.

More insidious than justifying failure is justifying success. That is, convincing yourself a failure was actually a success:

There are times to find the silver lining. If you’re starting out, everything is a learning experience, failure or not.

But at some point you’re grown up enough to have known better and done better. You aren’t doing yourself favors by reasoning that a failure or even a middling success is actually what you wanted.

It takes discipline to do your homework again, but it takes courage to take a hard look at what’s just-okay, and decide you could do better.

Aphorism: “A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that’s too long.” —William Zinsser

Cool: These golf pants (Amazon) are great for flying comfortably without looking too sloppy.

Best,
David
P.S. To evaluate success or failure, know ahead of time whether you’re playing a sure bet, or wildcard.

P.P.S. Thank you to Dan Cook for writing about me in the Bone Zone, which I promise isn’t what you think.

LM: #277: When to start less

August 19, 2024

As I’ve gotten better at finishing what I start, I’ve run into a conundrum.

My problem going into a project used to be I had no idea what to expect. How long or complex would the project be?

The solution was to start lots of projects. I’d get in over my head on many, but I’d learn from those false starts to make some finishes.

I still often misjudge how complex a project will be. But now I can usually persevere to complete it anyway.

So the project takes more time and resources than I had expected, and I’m often in the midst of one project, thinking of all the others I want to work on once I’ve finished.

When I had finished little, it made sense to start a lot. Analysis would only lead to paralysis.

But now that I’ve finished a lot, I need to be more careful what I start. Each project is a commitment of several months or years. As I get older, I have fewer months and years to do all I dream, and less energy to fill a large portion of that time with effortful progress.

Paradoxically, when you can’t finish what you start, you should start more. When you can, you should start less.

Aphorism: “The less secure and confident you feel in the direction, the more surprises and excitement you will have in store.” —Jerry Seinfeld

Book: Youth In Revolt (Amazon) is another modern-day Catcher In the Rye.

Best,
David
P.S. Early in your journey, don’t fall into the trap of Too Many Ideas, Must Pick One.

« Newer Posts
Older Posts »