Hi everyone,
There is a rhythm that I seem to hit every year around this time. For some reason, it always takes me a few weeks to come down off the intensity of the holiday season and settle into a normal flow. This week is the first time my writing practice feels like it’s a part of my daily routine since 2021 when we were deep in the pandemic and I didn’t have anything else to do but write. I’m thankful that we are putting more and more distance between us and the height of the pandemic, and that I am able to channel some of that deep work energy I had two years ago.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week’s post!
Tips
How To Thrive In The Creative Economy: When I started teaching entrepreneurship in 2007, the world was different. Students in my class were intoxicated by the thought of opening massive businesses. With a box store mentality (think Walmart) creatives didn’t dare consider ways that they could open a business on their own and rule the world. Today, the creative economy allows just about anyone with an internet connection to become a small business owner and find financial stability in the process.
Tip: Earn one dollar online. Creatives have a tough time separating income from an hour of time. Put the time in now to develop products that can then be sold passively as an additional line of income. Here’s a great article to get you started.
Related: How To Track Your Income And Build Financial Stability
How To Find Your Community: The internet allows us to find people with the exact same interests and beliefs as us at any moment. Some call this an echo chamber, which gets us into trouble when it comes to politics, however, online communities allow creatives to test their ideas on like-minded individuals who may be difficult to find in the real world.
Tip: Author Noah Smith calls these vertical communities and it is a great way to think about the types of communities creatives should consider when building an online audience. As creatives, our job is to balance the deep engagement we are able to have online with horizontal communities in the real world that might have a much smaller understanding of the work we are trying to create.
Related: 4 Things To Consider As You Find A Place Called Home
How To Advance Your Career: One of the best ways to advance my career has always been to learn from people who are doing similar work to me in my field. Whether in person or reading about their work, I have always found that being curious about the lives of others has been a great way for me to create a strategy for my own career.
Tip: Identify a few individuals who are 5-6 years ahead of you in your career, connect with them, and ask them for a cup of coffee. You will be surprised how many people say yes. I am also a fan of posts like this that contain short bits of advice for a successful career and life. I always come away with at least a couple of thought-provoking ideas to help me advance my career.
Related: 46 Tips For Creatives I Learned In 46 Years
Things I Loved
- Perplexity uses AI technology to give research-based information to your questions.
- Here is an incredible article about how artists get paid from streaming.
- This site increases traffic on social media by turning images into clickable social cards.
- Here is an image that shows the relative size of different everyday particles.
- This site asks you to guess when each of a series of photos was taken. I scored 3,509 the first time I played.
Last Week’s Most Read Articles
- How To Track Your Income And Build Financial Stability
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Photo Credit: Helena Lopes
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