ELEMENTARY

“My brain weighs eight pounds,” my friend gloated. We were eight years old. I burst out laughing so hard. So did she. Even as children, we both figured that was absurd. As if having a big, heavy, brain would make you smarter. (Looks like the jury is still out on this…) “He’s doing very well for himself, obviously he’s super smart,” I heard last week. I didn’t laugh at this. I winced. The comment was not ironic. In my mind: So, because he’s doing well for himself, he’s labeled as “smart” — not anything else? The adjective, “smart,” is inherently lazy (just like the word, “busy”)...

According to a study from Nielsen in 2009, on average we spend 8.5 hours each day on our screens. I imagine this has only increased since phones have gotten better. Despite not always liking the experience, if left unchecked, we want our phones badly enough to spend hours a day on it. “I don’t think any man or woman on his or her deathbed ever wished he or she had spent more time sending IMs or playing online poker, either. But hell, I could be wrong,” writes author Stephen King. Yet our love of,...

“7 Startups Vying to Become the Uber of Pot.” The headline simultaneously breaks my heart and puts my eyes through the ocular experience of hearing Yoko Ono’s scream song.(Real headline, btw.) Glitzy sensationalism, VC incentives, and the prestigious job title of “entrepreneur,” make technology startups hotter than ever. Stories of these starving entrepreneurs get covered and shared (my dear aunt sent me that one). That would be fine, but… Unfortunately, the stories of many less exciting, but on average more lucrative, companies get buried...

“Annie was definitely a long shot to win this all. But as the only female at the table, she is now the last man standing,” the commentator says. After a quick hug, Phil Hellmuth walks away from the table in a huff of disbelief. Annie Duke recalls this story for The Moth, describing the difficult circumstances and the emotions that she couldn’t show. (Highly recommended.) As a professional poker player, Duke made millions reading other people at the table. So for her, writing is not purely a solitary act spent in front of a computer...

An investigation into five iterations of Slack’s homepage reveals: · When selling features is more powerful than selling benefits · An oft-overlooked technique to share emotion through a website · How Slack changes what they say about their most important features Words don’t appear out of thin air. They are borne of ideas and values, and painstakingly combined, chosen, then refined. Over, and over, and over again. The right words, in the right order, in the right place, at the right time, sets off billions of neurons in the reader’s brain...

Facing of a looming deadline for her business column on Forbes on a day like any other in 2013, Pofeldt found a much needed story. It appeared in the form of a list of one-person companies that made $1–2.49 million USD and delved in. The list was organized by industry, so she covered the story within that framework. Readers loved the piece, which received over 200,000 pageviews at the time of writing. They wanted more. Encouraged by her editor, Pofeldt asked her readers to come forward if they ran one of these companies...

An investigation into Slack’s websites, social media presence, and content strategy reveals: · How Slack repeats itself constantly, and why · How Slack operates its marketing arm like a media company would · The quantitative and qualitative ROI on Slack’s content marketing Before we dive in, I looked at a few versions of Slack’s websites to make these observations. I call them, V1, V2, V3, V3.5, and V4. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” This analogy applies to the ideas we so painstakingly put together...

The sun was shining on Ramón Pérez. He and two friends were relaxing in a rented beach house in San Diego, a week before they would be joined by thousands of others from around the world for Comic-Con. Since the WildStorm offices (pre-DC Comics acquisition) were just a 20 minute walk away, they connected with senior editor Ben Abernathy and grabbed pints and tacos with him. They all exchanged contact information after, but didn’t talk about working together at all. A few weeks later, Abernathy...

J.K. Rowling scribbled down the first 40 names of characters that would appear in Harry Potter in a paper notebook. J.J. Abrams writes his first drafts in a paper notebook. Upon his return to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs first cut through the existing complexity by drawing a simple chart on whiteboard. Of course, they’re not the only ones… Here’s the notebook that belongs to Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. Most of the pages in his notebook resemble the right side, although he has said to Design...

An investigation into five iterations of wework's homepage (v1, v2, v3, v4, v5/v5.5) reveals: · Why themes are important in tying together the messy parts of your business story · How to make yourself...