Reject the Algorithm – Of Dollars and Data

ask yourself: Do you want to be known for the sake of being known? Then you might want to consider being a YouTuber who eats Tide Pods. Or do you want to become known for a niche you own? And if so, then put your ego in the backseat and give the “niche” the spotlight. Evangelize it. Educate people on it. Don’t market “yourself.” Market, write about

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Unfortunately, the vast majority of writers don’t create their own categories. To be honest, most don’t even know they can—let alone how. Instead, what they do is they spend their entire lives trying to compete in someone else’s category. From the moment they decide they want to become a writer, they look at someone else and think, “That’s who I wa

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If you go too far off the beaten path of algorithmic consistency, you risk never being heard. You may never get enough cultural momentum to exist in any meaningful way. That is a real problem. But if you're too good at algorithmic optimization, you risk building a large audience without saying anything particularly original or important. Not to men... See more

“You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art.

Do what’s personal... See more