David Moldawer

Book collaborator and ghostwriter specializing in business, personal development, and self-help.

📍 Montclair, NJ https://bookitect.com

the holy trinity of palm pilot, flip phone, and ipod

Judging from that thousand-yard stare, you’ve been reading the news again. Stop that! You’re not going to fix anything, unless you’re Robert Mueller, in which case, stop procrastinating and get back to those indictments. For the rest of you: While I can’t help you unsee any

taking the social media babies out of the social media bathwater

I don’t use Facebook right now. I may never return. Facebook, IMHO, is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad thing. That said, I distinguish between Facebook, the person—corporations are people [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood]—and the actual, you know, people who do Mr. Facebook’

I don’t believe in subject lines anymore—it’s the maven game, OK?

On Thursday, I brought my month-long digital sabbatical to a close. I’ll admit it, I was pretty jazzed to do so. I kicked back, cracked open the MacBook, and opened a whole slew of tabs: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS reader, New York Times, Slate, Reddit, etc. By the way,

cobbler, stick to your last

If you like the Maven Game, you’ll love Doug Rushkoff—assuming you aren’t already familiar with his work. The world is a scary place and increasingly I prefer Doug’s lens for making sense of it. Read Doug’s most recent book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,

the awkward power of actual community

It’s hard to sit and write. I clench at the very thought of it. Have you noticed this clenching phenomenon? I imagine it’s similar to standing in front of Tony Robbins’s 57° F plunge pool [https://www.tonyrobbins.com/health-vitality/the-power-of-cold-water/]. You can’t think about doing

craftspersonship and sauntering buff-models

First: I’m giving a lecture to a class at NYU about innovation in publishing in a few weeks. What should I talk about—whether we still need dust jackets in an age of robot vacuums? I’m lost. Help. Second: anyone coming to town for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book

the power move

Back in high school, I took a summer job at an insurance company based right off Times Square. It paid eleven dollars an hour and there was air conditioning—one of my better jobs overall. Mostly, I’d sit in the back room with the IT guy. Now and then,

ten lessons you’ll wish you’d been taught

Your environment profoundly affects your writing. You don’t pay enough attention to it. What do you read? What do you listen to? Where do you sit when you write? What’s in your field of vision? What forms the substrate of your work? It matters. I’ve curtailed my

lost in metaphor, like a child in the woods—wait, that’s a simile…

When I was a young editor at St. Martin’s Press, I was invited to a meeting with Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED. Since I managed the Let’s Go series at the time, Wurman’s new travel guide seemed like a fit for me, so I was

making the leap from intermediate to advanced

This essay [https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-traits-of-a-proficient-programmer] , excerpted from a book on programming, applies just as much to writing as it does to code. The author, Gregory Brown, draws a useful line between competence and proficiency: > Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency