As summer finally breaks and gives way to fall here in Canada, I’ve spent a lot of time at work. The fall is always a busy season for me. It feels like we’re all bracing to huddle up, buckle down, and close up shop for winter mentally.

In the mornings, I catch up on a little reading. I thought I’d share what stood out to me over the past couple weeks below:

1. Cabel Sasser’s talk at the last XOXO was incredibly inspiring. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in art and what we leave behind, I implore you to watch it all the way through to the end.
2. Canada has a long heritage of good design. I’m not joking! There is great stuff everywhere. We have cool brand identities dominating our grocery store aisles. But there is almost nothing more Canadian than the CBC logo. Richard Baird’s retrospective on the history of the logo was illuminating and itself well designed. 
3. Dan Mall, one of the most pioneering digital designers working today, goes on a fall photography trip every year and shares his photos. His photos this year are stunning.
4. “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.” The Bob Spotter is cultural surveillance designed to capture the music that makes us bob our heads, without anyone’s consent, in an effort to graph our taste culturally rather than individually. I love this experiment; it reminds me of the internet of old. As Alex Cranz recently wrote for The Verge, the internet used to be for horny weirdos and college students, and Bob Spotter feels like it’s reminiscent of that time.
5. David Sparks noticed something at the British Museum in London: the ancient craftsmen were uninterested in perfection. They’re making art that is good enough, but even that art we call timeless. (There is hope for us yet.)
6. Stephen Robles, a YouTuber whose content I don’t watch, recently hit one hundred thousand subscribers. He made a video about getting started on making something with a key message: it’s never too late.
7. In what has clearly been a theme for me over the past two weeks, It’s Nice That published a feature about perfectionism and the way it helps and hurts us, seemingly simultaneously.
8. Nintendo has a music app now, in case you want to listen to any of their absolute bangers from a collection of classic games and franchises while you work.
9. On the topic of music, Apple published a press release this week about how it developed the new hearing aid feature for its AirPods Pro. Granted, this is just a press release, but it’s an inspiring story that reminds me some technology, even in our current age of AI consuming and subsuming all of humanity, is still worth being optimistic about.
10. I recently discovered Hyperessays, the home of Michel de Montaigne’s translated essays on the internet. They’re all very good, but so is the website’s design, which achieves the rarified status of feeling like you’re reading a book.
11. Tim Kreider’s 2012 essay ​“The Busy Trap” is a great read about separating ourselves from our work and our incomes. The entire thing is immensely quotable, the sort of thing you might read aloud to your spouse (if they were into that). My favourite quote is this: ​“The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” This essay is as strong an argument for Universal Basic Income as any could be.

Until next time: stay relentless.

Your creative work does not require output to have value. To put it differently, your creativity doesn’t have to result in a product to have personal value for you.

As kids, we’d play with LEGO and action figures without trying to monetize our creations or our stories. I was in a bunch of bands in high school that went nowhere outside of a basement, but it was a lot of fun to play.

To be creative is to play. To play, you have to abandon all notions of production. Otherwise, it’s a job in disguise.

Creativity and productivity are not intrinsically related.

A lot of folks spend their evenings on their side hustles. I don’t have a lot of free evening time anymore. But even if I did, I don’t know if I could make that arrangement work.

My friend and business coach Shawn Blanc has a saying: ​“Work with your head. Rest with your hands.” His idea is that information workers engage mentally with their work. When their day is done and it’s time to rest, they need to turn off their brains and engage in a rejuvenating hobby (Netflix doesn’t count). His suggestion is to find hobbies that are physically engaging, like car maintenance, woodworking, or exercise.

If I sat at my computer all day and designed things, then spent the evening making music in front of the same computer, at the same desk, in the same room, I’d never get a break from my mental work. I wouldn’t even get a break from my physical studio. As much as I love my studio, that’s not good for my mental health.

A creative practice benefits from existing in a separate physical environment from one’s workplace — even if your work is creative, or you work from home. This is one of the big reasons I like having a laptop I plug in to a huge monitor: when it’s time to do something different, you can unplug the laptop and bring it to a different space, but avoid managing multiple machines.

On the other hand, I think there’s a benefit in buying a desktop computer instead of a laptop. When you stop working for the day, walk away from the screen and find something else to do. For me, shifting from a mental task (designing rectangles and programming websites) to a physical task (like playing guitar or exercising) has huge mental health benefits for my day-to-day life.

A couple weeks ago, I made the difficult decision to slow down my work on a YouTube channel I was working on. I recorded backing track videos for guitarists. Each week, I’d write a track, record all the individual parts (using a mix of real guitars and midi instruments for drum parts and the like), put together the video with all the chord changes and scale sheets, and put it in the YouTube machine.

The process took 8 – 12 hours per week. I spent one business day every week recording the audio and making the video. 

It was too much because it was no longer a hobby for me. It had turned into a side hustle.

Here’s what I think the difference is: a creative hobby is something that you do exclusively for you. It won’t make you money. It doesn’t inherently earn you an audience. It’s for fun. To make this as simple as possible, maybe you play an instrument. Maybe you draw.

On the other hand, a side hustle is something you make for other people. It can bring you the same amount of joy as a hobby, but the primary goal is providing a service or product for other people. My backing tracks became a side hustle. I made them for other people and hoped to grow an audience. If you play an instrument and you start releasing music, the minute that stops being about self-satisfaction and becomes something you do for the pursuit of an audience, it’s a side hustle.

The shift from a creative pursuit to a side hustle is a shift in focus.

Side hustles don’t have to make you money. You can do something creative for the benefit of others without earning an income. But if they do make you money, it becomes harder for that project to creatively nourish you. The pressure of the dollar is real. 

I decided to slow down on the YouTube output, though, because the calculus on my time compared to the potential financial reward (many years from now) didn’t make much sense to me. It made more sense to double down on my design business — a creative outlet people are happy to pay me for — than it did for me to focus on my side hustle.

My guitar playing is currently back to being merely a hobby. I loved making backing tracks, and I’m always making music, and it was hard to say goodbye. But one must say no to one thing to say yes to another.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s novels. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a popular fantasy author with a wildly optimistic outlook on people, and a knack for world building and magic systems. 

He’s also extremely prolific.

Since George R.R. Martin published Dance of Dragons in 2011 (the most recently published book in his Song of Ice and Fire series), Brandon Sanderson has published ten novels. (That’s not including his novellas.) Some of those books are lengthy tomes that take dozens of hours to read.

Not that Sanderson and George R.R. Martin are in a competition, but if they were, Sanderson wins the output competition. And, at this point, I think he’d win the quality competition. Sanderson is becoming a better writer all the time, and I think it’s because he writes constantly. (Quantity breeds quality.)

I thought about this in light of my own creative practice, of course, and wondered how somebody like Brandon Sanderson gets all that writing done. That’s a lot of words. It turns out, Sanderson’s website has a whole section about his process. He has a page about his daily word count and time goals that I found interesting:

I write every day, and I give myself wordcount goals. (Usually, it’s 2k min, or a certain page goal if revising). It varies though. 10 pages is often my goal. I usually hit it, and sometimes do much more… Also, some days I write for four or five hours – some days I write fourteen or sixteen… The truth is, I love what I do. So if I have time when I’m not doing something else, I work on books… Most days, usually, formally, I write from about noon until four, and then I’ll hang out with my family and do other stuff until about ten, and I’ll start writing from about ten until midnight. No from about ten until 4AM.

First, Sanderson writes a lot more than many other authors who have documented their process. Stephen King writes for four hours a day (his process also includes an afternoon nap, which sounds awesome).

Second, Sanderon’s word count is impressive. Two thousand words a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but two thousand words a day about stories and people you’ve conjured out of thin air is no picnic. Two thousand words is double what Stephen King writes in a day. (Again, this isn’t a competition, but it’s interesting to compare two prolific writers. King has written eighteen books since Dance of Dragons. His books are shorter, in case that’s not obvious. Later was an excellent read, in case you wonder if he’s still got it after all these years.)

Put all this aside, though, for just a minute: how do writers like Sanderson and King write this much, all the time? How do you show up every day?

Of course, Brandon Sanderson has something to say about that:

Writer’s block for me is where I’m a few chapters in and the story’s not flowing ​‚or I’m in the middle of the book somewhere and a chapter is just not working… I deal with it by writing the next part anyway, and it often doesn’t work, but I can set it aside and try it again the next day. I find that just writing it anyway, writing it poorly, and setting aside what I wrote and trying again fixes the problem almost every single time. 

Sanderson writes the hard part anyway, then moves on even though it stinks.

I know it sounds a lot like I’m saying ​“just do the work to be creative and you’ll get it done,” and that’s not helpful. But stay with me here: there are at least two takeaways from what Sanderson is saying that I think are immensely helpful.

1. Set aside a time in your day when you get to do your creative work. Stephen King writes the same four hours every day. On ​“most days,” Sanderson writes from noon to 4, then 10pm to midnight. Make an appointment on your calendar and keep it.
2. In that time period, don’t worry about perfection. Your first ​“draft” might stink. That’s why pencils have erasers, Adobe Illustrator has so many ​“Dupe” shortcuts, programmers have the Delete key, and writers have editors.

The hardest thing is point number one. Let’s say you have a 9 – 5, but you take photos in the evening. That sucks. The best light is gone when the sun is down. You have to come up with some creative ways to make a daily practice out of that, but this is a creative process — coming up with creative solutions to hard problems is the work.

Even if your day job is doing creative work — maybe you’re a freelancer like me — it’s still hard to find a consistent time. Trust me, people love meetings, and many clients are more interested in meeting with you than they are in your completion of their work.

But if you can find the time to show up every day, and keep that appointment with yourself, the second problem solves itself. Your first drafts get better. You get blocked less often. The mere act of showing up triggers your brain’s neurological pathways into doing the work.

The hard part is making the time to do your creative work. To do the stuff that matters. Don’t try to find the time. You won’t. You must make it for yourself.

Last week, my wife and I streamed Girl, Interrupted, which I hadn’t seen in about twenty years. There’s a moment where a psychologist explains the protagonist’s central problem: she is unnecessarily choosing to embrace her pain and live in a psychiatric institution: 

Quis hic locus?, quae regio?, quae mundi plaga? What world is this?… What kingdom?… What shores of what worlds? It’s a very big question you’re faced with, Susanna. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are they flaws?… If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital?… for life?

I immediately rewrote this quote in my mind to be less negative: The choice of your life is this: What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?

Naturally, this whole thing reminded me of the creative process, which to me is about embracing ourselves and our imperfections. If we can’t accept our flaws, we’ll never make anything worthwhile. I think we can create from a good place or a bad place, but each unique creation of ours bears the signature flaws that make us unique. So if we want to commit ourselves to doing good creative work for all our lives, we have to embrace our flaws. 

Of course, the central question is, are they flaws?

Like many things in life, non-western cultures are much better at this. The Japanese allow imperfection and accept it in all things, including art. They even have a word for it: wabi-sabi. For them, something isn’t beautiful unless it is imperfect, or impermanent, or incomplete. I’m struck that we as humans are all imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. We want to find things that remind us of ourselves.

Traditional Hebrew rabbis encourage the admittance of imperfection. As Rabbi Ari Lev writes, ​“And amidst our imperfections may we have the courage and compassion to to say to ourselves, Hinein — Here I am, I am not perfect, but I am very good.” (Modern western Christianity barely has a basic understanding of this concept and has made ignoring it a cottage industry of theirs.)

The flaw in my work, or maybe the flaw within myself, is a fear of impermanence. I have struggled with the impermanence of my work for years. I design websites and web apps for a living. They have a life cycle of somewhere around seven minutes before some executive gets the brilliant idea that a redesign will fix all their problems, which is disheartening when you spend months or even years of your life working with clients on large projects.

But wabi-sabi: embrace your flaws, and embrace the flaws in your work.

To counter this, I make music. I record it. I share it. I have a little Youtube channel, and a Patreon, and a Bandcamp page, all that junk. In my mind, it’s evergreen: a piece of music lasts a lot longer than most websites. The music I make and put on Youtube will be as valuable in 2033 as it is in 2023. 

Every week, I spend at least one day a week just making music. It keeps me sane when I make something as impermanent as a website the next day.

What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?

When in your life did you feel like you were the most creative?

I don’t mean productive. Creativity and productivity are different.

I mean creative. When in your life did you feel like your output matched your input?¹

The concept of achieving a flow state has become so popular that it has a detailed Wikipedia page. What if one could achieve flow for longer than a few hours at a time? What if one were able to pursue flow, relentlessly, without ceasing, for months or even years at a time?

I don’t really think of that as a flow state any more. I call it ​“relentless creativity.” And I think I achieved it once for a period of a few months, or a year.

This period of relentless creativity began in March of 2020. This was the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, of course, but I’m not sure it was just the one event that created these circumstances. And I’m also not sure how long it lasted. For all I know, I was in this state for two years. Thanks to the way COVID compressed the feeling of time², I couldn’t say how long the state of relentless creativity lasted with any certainty³.

I would like to experience that flow state again. And I’d like to stay there.

With that in mind, I plan on writing a lot more about achieving this state in the coming months. I thought it would make sense to start by thinking through what allowed me to become relentless creative in 2020:

• Certainly, COVID was part of it. COVID meant there was nothing to do but keep up with the news (and lose your soul), or get to work. I chose the latter.
• I was fortunate, though, to have a great workspace in my home. At the time, I was working on an iMac Pro in a den in the condo. There was a designated space to get to work. I couldn’t just pick up a laptop and go lie on the couch. My desk was on wheels, but I couldn’t move it too far. Our condo wasn’t that big!
• The condo might have played a role in it too: when a third of your living space is designated to be your working space, it’s pretty easy to make your way to the studio each morning and get to work.
• And another thing that might have helped were the clients I had at the time: thanks to COVID, my work exploded, and I had more work than ever before. I was at the magical point in my career where people wanted to work with me specifically, and had started to seek me out. Suddenly, my thoughts carried real weight, and my opinionated designs were welcomed and encouraged. (I’ve been blessed to have a great roster of clients ever since.)

All of this to say that my environment was extremely conducive to creative work at the time (James Clear says your environment will dictate your behavioural defaults.

None of that accounts for the other half of this equation: the inputs.

• In 2020, my wife and I watched 166 movies. (That remains our record.)
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons had just come out for the Switch. I was playing it every morning. I would hop on before work for fifteen minutes and check turnip prices (IYKYK). Something about that small (and extremely cheerful) dopamine hit would trigger something in my brain and I’d happily get to work after.
• In the evenings, if we weren’t watching movies, I was often playing hard video games. According to my notes, during COVID, I 100% completed Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and 2018’s God of War on the highest difficulty. It was in this time period that I fell in love with these high-skill-level games. For me, it was a way to cope with depression. (It’s still a way I cope with my depression.)

Between video games and movies, I was absorbing a lot of visual media every day, and I was often engaging with the material at an intellectual level. I was allowing my work to be influenced, in some subconscious way, by all the media I was working with.

I don’t mean to state that the best way to become more creative is to mindlessly binge Netflix for hours. But we all need to become inspired somehow. Curating what we engage with, and picking the thing that most inspires us to do our best work, is going to go a long way to making us more creative.

The point is: creativity isn’t exclusively a measure of our output. It’s also an indication of our input.

My thoughts on becoming relentlessly creative right now are fairly simple:

1. Create an environment where creativity is your default. To repeat my own example: if you work with computers, there is a lot of value in getting a nice desktop and a good monitor. (I’d love a Mac Studio.) The whole point is to create a dedicated environment to do your work in. You will not be more creative if you lug your tools to all sorts of different rooms. You’re just rearranging the furniture in an effort to procrastinate.
2. Consume as many good inputs as possible. This might not mean reading a book or watching a movie; it might mean engaging with another hobby. Maybe you play the piano to engage different mental muscles (playing an instrument has similar effects to learning another language), or perhaps you like woodworking on the weekends.
3. I didn’t mention this above, but showing up every day to make your art is going to have a big impact on your work. ​“Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.”
4. And again, I didn’t mention this above, but exercise as often as possible. Some research suggests that creativity and physical health are linked. The connection is probably not direct, but even an indirect connection with positive effects is worth exploring in our own lives.

Go make something beautiful.

Today, I get to eat a little crow: contrary to my publicly stated intentions, I did not return my iPad Pro. The short version is that my old iPad Pro more or less died on me. 

In my previous post, I wrote that I could do everything I needed on an iPad with pen and paper. The thing is, I didn’t inventory my work on iPadOS until after I wrote that post. (This was stupid of me.) That was when I thought to myself: ​“Shoot, I do a lot of iPad-only stuff when I’m working on wireframes.” I’ll frequently grab screenshots of apps and websites and place them alongside my sketches. I tend to iterate on ideas from left to right, duplicating old ideas, erasing what didn’t work, and sketching more (as though I were duplicating art boards in Figma). 

On top of that, a lot of my clients are long-term clients, and the work that I do months or years prior might (and has) become useful again, even if it were disregarded prior. I do not want to keep stacks of draft paper filed away for months or years at a time.

At that point, I made a decision: I still don’t need this new iPad, but I do need my old one.

So I booted up my 2017 10.5” iPad Pro, which I had previously formatted for trade-in, and set it up again. I had a bit of work to do, so once Freeform was ready, I got to it.

That was when I noticed the smell.

The iPad had this faint smell of burning plastic, but only when I held my face near it (which I tend do while drawing; please do not judge me and my weird habits). I’m no engineer, but I know that anything resembling the smell of fire in a battery-powered product was bad, so I shut the iPad down, and made a new plan.

Clearly, my 2017 iPad Pro was kicking the bucket.

So, in an effort to get the best bang for my buck and make the new one last, I would keep the 2024 iPad Pro, and trade in the 2017 iPad Pro.

A day or two later, I brought the 2017 iPad Pro to the Apple Store to trade it in. I explained what I just wrote, but the Apple Genius seemed nonplussed. ​“Does the device power on?” he asked. I said yes. ​“Does the screen work?” he asked. I said yes again. Finally, he asked if Touch ID worked and there were any large dents or scratches. I said yes and no, respectively, but I added that the battery only lasts an hour and may or may not be swelling. He again, said this wasn’t an issue and they would check all that during their diagnosis.

So he used whatever fancy tool Apple has for this, signed off on everything, and gave me a refund of $100 towards the 2024 iPad Pro (which felt pretty generous, all things considered).

Then he got me to wipe the 2017 iPad Pro, and something happened.

The iPad froze after I entered my password to disable Find My on the iPad. ​“Oh yeah, this happens all the time,” the Genius said. ​“On every product, not just iPads. iPhones and Macs all freeze here too. Don’t worry.” 

Then the iPad unceremoniously shut down. 

I asked if we should have seen an Apple logo with a loading indicator below it (we should have), and the Genius said yes. But then he added nonchalantly, ​“Who knows though? I’ll be back.”

He spent a few minutes helping other customers before he returned. My iPad still hadn’t rebooted.

“You said the battery doesn’t last, right?”

I said yes.

He took about thirty seconds to find a Lighting charger buried somewhere in the deep recesses of the store and plugged the iPad Pro in. It still didn’t turn on. 

The Genius’ brow furrowed. ​“I think your iPad is dead.” Seeing my immediate look of concern, he added, ​“but we already gave you the money for the trade in, so it’s our problem now.”

I spent another several minutes with him while he tried every troubleshooting method I knew of and a couple I didn’t. Eventually, the iPad rebooted long enough just long enough for us to see the iOS welcome screen. ​“There. Your data’s been wiped,” he confirmed. 

Then the screen turned off again as the iPad shut down, while plugged directly into an outlet.

And that, dear reader, is how my old iPad Pro died the moment after Apple gave me my trade-in value for it. As my father-in-law pointed out to me, it is rare in life for a system like that to work in your favour, so cherish it while it lasts.

I did, however, return the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, which only served to help me procrastinate on the iPad before returning to my Mac. I replaced it with the Smart Folio cover, which is totally fine.

About a week ago, I took delivery of a new M4 iPad Pro. My old iPad, a 2017 model, lasts about an hour on battery life, and the Pencil is starting to get laggy. Now seemed like a great time to upgrade.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve really enjoyed my time with the iPad. But I’m going to return it, because it’s not a tool I can use to get my work done. I wrote about this in 2020, and the situation hasn’t changed. (In fact, it’s more true for me now than it was then; I’ve added audio and video production work to my plate, and I need Mac-specific tools more than ever before.)

I’m not upset about this. My brain is most compatible with macOS, it turns out. I like having many windows open at once, and I like having a file system. Every time I sit in front of the iPad with its Magic Keyboard attached, my brain tricks itself into thinking I’m sitting in front of a capable laptop, and then I waste hours of time not doing my actual work. So the iPad Pro is going to go back, because there are many other interesting ways to spend that $2,000.

What this did make me realize is that the tools don’t matter. As makers, creative pros, we can use whatever we want to use. If we like fancy pens and paper, use them (​“you will not be the reason that our forests disappear”). And if you like iPads, use those, if you can.

That being said, it’s our responsibility as makers to discern the right tool for the job. Two weeks ago, a plumber came to our home to fix an issue with a toilet. He did not need to use a hammer to fix our toilet, and thank goodness he didn’t try! (Imagine the thunderous crack of a hammer colliding with porcelain.)

Instead, the plumber used a screwdriver and a couple minor objects unique to his trade. He disassembled a couple things, replaced a part, and put it all back together in under twenty minutes.

Let’s pretend, though, that the plumber always admired the shape of hammers and the satisfaction he gets when he swings one. If he were a little off his rocker, he might attempt to use a hammer for all his work. Even an outside observer would recognize this as problematic.

I think I feel similarly about the articles I’ve read in which folks suggest the iPad virtualize macOS as a sort of ​“escape hatch” for Apple (Steve Troughton-Smith put it best). I’m sure I would love macOS on an iPad. I’m not arguing with that. But, to continue with my tool metaphor, let’s call a spade a spade and deal with the object as it is. Let the iPad be an iPad.

One other thing I’ve been thinking about is the continued movement to digitize everything in our lives. The a‑ha moment for me about my iPad came when I realized I can just sketch wireframes for my clients on a piece of paper. Not only is the tool I use for wireframing irrelevant to my clients, but the increased focus I’ll get from paper’s inherent limitations (no wifi!) is a boon in the context of work.

Or, to put it another way, does every room need to have a computer in it? We are so addicted to computers. New computers promise to work better in daylight and remove blue light in an effort to suggest, I suppose, that you can use their product anywhere, anytime — or more aptly, everywhere, all the time.

Perhaps we need to get better at saying no thanks to technology that doesn’t dramatically improve our lives.

After years of contemplating Youtube as a medium, I finally started my own channel about two weeks ago. To my knowledge, I’ve done it exactly right: I picked a niche, decided on a schedule and a flow, made a few videos on my own before posting anything to see if I could do it at all, and started scheduling my uploads.

(I’m not going to share the link to the channel here, because I don’t want to disturb the algorithm while it identifies my audience. The people who read this blog are probably not the people who would be interested in my Youtube channel, which is just rhythm backing tracks for guitar players to practice over.)

It’s been an interesting couple weeks, and I’ve learned a lot very quickly. I uploaded my first video nine days ago. My understanding is that you’re lucky to get ten views on your first video. My first video has 474 views.

At one point, the first video tapered off with fifty views or so. I wondered if I just picked a bad day to upload it, so I opted to try a different schedule going forward. I posted my second video only a few days later, and it got somewhat cannibalized by the first video. My second video has been up for six days, and currently has 169 views.

These numbers are very good! I’m pleased with them, I suppose. I think I’ve identified a good niche.

That all being said, after staring at the numbers for a week, I had a few observations that I thought I’d share, mostly out of my own interest:

1. It’s so easy to develop an obsession with checking these numbers. An obsession. I think I check the numbers twenty times a day. This actually hampers enthusiasm, because instead of seeing the numbers go up by dozens every day, you see the numbers go up in increments of two or three, which is less encouraging.
2. My first video has 16 likes, but got its first dislike this morning. It turns out that the dislike is not a useful metric for the creator. It tells you nothing about what that person disliked, but it does give you a reason to feel bad about yourself. 94.1% approval is great — a number I should be totally okay with — but all I really feel is the 5.9% disapproval.
3. The other reason the dislike means nothing is because, for all I know, somebody clicked or tapped the wrong button. In the same timeframe, I got a new subscriber. For all I know, this person is also the person who gave my video the thumbs down, but they did it accidentally on the way to the Subscribe button. The web designer in me knows that the margin for human error on the internet is… huge.

The biggest takeaway I have so far about the Youtube algorithm is that it operates similarly to Google’s SEO algorithms: it’s interested in content that gets eyeballs, and it’s pretty heartless about anything that doesn’t do that.

One person said that if you plug away at your channel for a while, and you never develop an audience, there’s a good chance that people simply don’t care about your videos. That would obviously be extremely painful for the content creator behind those videos, but there’s an element of truth there.

I think Google’s search engine algorithm operates at a similar level, but because Google doesn’t control the entire internet (thankfully!), they don’t have the same level of control. That creates an opportunity for abusive and scammy sites to make their way to the top. (One could argue page one of Google has become increasingly useless.) In that sense, this is an apples and oranges comparison, but there is still some truth there. 

Real success is, of course, a little more complicated than understanding the algorithm. Youtube Ali Abdaal has a great video where he breaks down how to be ​“internet successful” better than I ever could: ​“find your unfair advantage.”

His theory is very interesting: successful Youtubers stand out because they have an unfair advantage. Everybody can work hard, but not everybody who runs an industrial design-focussed channel can claim they, say, worked for Apple.

Basically, you need to be a little lucky.

It was a good reminder for my client work, though: if you want to make a successful Youtube channel or a successful website, you need to have decent presentation, publish consistently, and be lucky enough to have a perspective people want to hear from.

… Yeah, super simple.

I’m a huge fan of Paul Reed Smith — the man and the instruments. Paul is smart and well-spoken. The way he talks about his guitars reminds me of the way Steve Jobs spoke about Apple products.

So when Paul speaks, I listen. Like Apple, PRS typically makes incremental improvements to their products, rather than the static lineups or complete refreshes other brands often do. This year, the ​“big” change are new ​“Wing” tuners (PRS claims they look like wings, which, okay). Instead of aluminum, they’re made out of plastic. The shape is different too.

What interests me is that Paul says this opens up up the guitar and makes the midrange sound more vowel-like. You have to take him at his word for it, because how would one measure that? And if it were true, is that actually more desirable? Every time I’m mixing a sound, I get rid of some of the more obnoxious 800hz midrange. If the vowel sound lives in that 800hz range (and again, there’s no way to really know if that’s what Paul means), then I don’t want it.

So I’m not convinced this is an upgrade. This sort of seems like cost saving measure sold as an upgrade (getting iPhone 5C vibes, which was also an interesting sales pitch). But I’m also not convinced it would sound better or worse than before, so much as different.

But it’s interesting to read all the hoopla surrounding NAMM 2024, and compare Paul’s announcement here. It’s very low key by comparison.

For me, PRS makes some of the nicest guitars money can buy right now. My Silver Sky SE is an incredibly inspiring instrument, and my Custom 24 Piezo is insanely versatile and feels like it was built for my hands. The violin carve also sits well on my body. I don’t mind the plastic tuners at first blush, but I’ll admit that I’m suddenly encouraged to buy 2023 models of anything I’m interested in.