The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts
9781781257661
Ryan Holiday
Notes
To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process…If you are trying to make something great, you must do the making: That work cannot be outsourced to someone else…there is one last thing you must do. You must deliberately forsake all other missions…you must be willing to be a big enough jerk—ahem, enough of a perfectionist—to say: “No, we’re not moving on from here until we get this right.”
“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.”
poet and artist Austin Kleon
“Focus on the things that don’t change.” – Jeff Bezos…“If you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way,” he says, “to find your own voice to matter today than listening to what’s on the radio and thinking: ‘I want to compete with this.’…the most original artworks “are not rated as such because they produce something new” but because they are saying something “as though it had never been said before.”…Platforms come and go like the wind. It’s always better to focus on the bigger picture, on the things that don’t change.
A book should be an article before it’s a book, and a dinner conversation before it’s an article. See how things go before going all in.
You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: this and for these people…Just as we should ask “Who is this for?” we must also ask “What does this do?” A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?…attempt to write out exactly what your project is supposed to be and to do in . . . One sentence. One paragraph. One page. This is a ______ that does ______. This helps people ______.
“Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
Marketing is an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself, to beat out the other talented folks whose entitlement or laziness holds them back…It is my job as the marketer of my work to make people care, and that’s not going to be possible if I start with any illusions or entitlements…Price is marketing…Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning.
Be a person. Be nice. Think relationship first, transaction second.
If I could give a prospective creative only one piece of advice, it would be this: Build a list. Specifically, an email list…To do our work without a platform is to be at the mercy of other people’s permission.
What they decide to work on and the attitude they bring to their work. Their ability to refine their creation and position that work properly. The energy and resources they throw at marketing. The platform they build and the audience they cultivate before and after they’ve made something. These are critical factors.