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Before You Build Your First Product, Do This

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  Before you build a product, create a whole program around a service you offer, or start printing business cards, you need to first see if you can sell something. And this is simpler than we realize. So far, we’ve identified why we create, the importance of making money off our art, how to know what to sell, and to whom, and so now… it’s time to sell. Yesterday, I asked you to find out who might be interested in your product, that is how you choose to package a solution to a felt need. I wanted you to float the idea out to a small group of people for feedback. At this point, you’re trying to gauge demand. Ideally, this would be done through a survey or some kind of open forum whereby people can freely respond, “Yes, I’d love to buy that book or listen to that song or take that course!” When you get a good amount of people telling you this—say, ten or so—you’ve demonstrated that there is some demand for this idea of yours. Now, it’s time to validate it. This is the point at which most
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Sell Them What They Want, Give Them What They Need

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  Before you figure out what you want to sell, you need to first figure out what people are willing to pay for. And the best way to do that is to actually get them to pay you. Today, I want to talk about product.  Now, this is a bit of a dance, as people often don’t know exactly what they’re willing to pay for until they see it. Steve Jobs once said that people don’t know what they want until “we show it to them.” I mean, that’s a bit of a narcissistic thing to say, but I think there’s some truth to it. Or in the words of Henry Ford, “If I listened to what people wanted, I would have given them a faster horse.” I never could have imagined the iPhone until it existed. The same goes for the Tesla or any other modern innovation that transcends category. Emerson said that you don’t get a Shakespeare by trying to be Shakespeare. You must ruthlessly be yourself while understanding what needs in the world aren’t being met. And in that intersection of your deepest joy and their deepest need is
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More Than Passion: Getting Clear on a Business Idea

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  To start a business, you need more than passion. Getting paid to create really is about getting clear on what people want. Before we get into the super practical work of actually accepting money from other people, we need to get clear on what we have to offer. Many people will tell you to just jump into this work without thinking too much about it. And I think that’s good: to not unnecessarily hesitate when it comes to taking action. But there is something powerful about taking just a brief pause to consider the work that you want to do before going for it. Because the truth is if you don’t get this right, it makes everything more difficult. Many people when they’re starting out in business—when they’re seeking to create work that they want others to buy—they believe a common myth, and the myth is this: Just follow your passion. As a fan of Joseph Campbell, I can say that passion (or “bliss” as he called it) is an essential and integral part of the process of finding the work you lov
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How to Write an Essay Fast

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With a truly tricky essay, 24 hours might be not enough. However, it might happen that you have less than an hour to craft a classy paper. Take your SATs for example. There, you’ll have to fit into a 30-minute time slot. Before you can write an essay quickly, you’ll need some committed training or a decent plan. If you didn’t have enough time to practice your speed writing skills, don’t worry. Because the key is detailed planning. So what’s the fastest way to write an essay? We’ll share with you the secrets of how to write essays faster below. “I need to write an essay fast. Do you have any tips?” A bunch of the following quick essay writing tips will lead you through this seemingly arduous task. They are the main steps you’d normally take when writing a paper. Before you get to them, we’d like to point out that the most important thing about fast-written essay is careful planning, remembering about time, and sticking to the point. 1. Plan Your Time How much do you have till you need t
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Don't Be a Completist When Writing Essays

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  If you looked at this album cover and concluded this record didn't win any Grammys, congratulations. You are presumably $8.45 (plus tax) richer than I am. A musical connoisseur and very discerning listener once told me, "I'm not the kind of Beatles fan who has to buy everything Paul McCartney puts out." This kind of thinking is very foreign to me. It's also a great essay-writing tip. As a Beatles fan who is also a completist, I need not only Paul's records in my collection but Ringo's oeuvre as well. But as a writer, this impulse can have negative consequences.   So what is a completist?  Here  is as good a definition as I've seen: "At its root, the completist impulse is about feeling as though there's no point in collecting something unless you have every single item."   Being a completist as a collector can be fun. I enjoy hunting down rare records or hard-to-find stamp issues. But when it comes to writing essays, completism should be
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Practical Tips for Poetry Analysis

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  One of the things that many students struggle with is analysing poetry. I remember sitting in my high school class; we read a poem out loud, and our teacher asked us to weigh in on the meaning. In all honesty, I had absolutely no clue. None. Then the smart girl raised her hand and started talking about rebirth imagery and Christian overtones. I was stumped. I had no clue where she got that from.  Fast forward to nearly 30 years since I sat in that high school class, and I've figured out the keys to analysing poetry, and I'm only too happy to share them with you. Understanding written text doesn't have to be a mystery, and it certainly doesn't have to make you feel as dumb as I did on that high school afternoon. Essays For Sale   TP-CASST(T) Once you have discussed the poem in an impressionistic and personal way, you can give the students a schema that may help them as they begin to work through an academic analysis of the poem.  One helpful strategy is “TP-CASST(T),”
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What to Do Before You Start Writing an Essay

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  Writing essays for school, college, and university can be daunting. In many ways the genre of the essay is slightly out dated in our world of blogs, texts, tweets, insta posts, and microblogging. Because we are less and less familiar with writing essays these days, they are often something we only do in the context of school. As a result, writing essays feels a bit weird. Add to that the fact that most teachers and professors out there may have first learned how to write essays either by hand or on old word processing software, whereas students these days have often learned not to write or type, but to text with their thumbs! So the technology is moving in one direction, but schools, colleges, universities, and testing boards still expect students to display mastery over essays - be they short exam essays or long graduate theses - and   so if you have an essay to write, what should you do first?   Open up your word processing software to a nice, clean, blank page.   WRONG!  https://e
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