By the time I got around to writing my final college admission essay, I already felt beaten. It had been brutally hard work presenting myself in the best possible light. In each previous essay, I’d prevaricated with a vengeance, glossing over my many defects as a college candidate: mediocre

The expression “to have your work cut out for you” originally meant “preparing what you need to accomplish a task smoothly and efficiently,” just as a tailor’s assistant cut out the necessary pieces of cloth for the boss to get right to work. By the time the idiom appeared

Maybe it’s the turn of the season—and what a winter this one promises to be—but I’ve been thinking about the meaning and importance of my work. What-am-I-doing-here questions. Lately, I’ve been dipping into A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy. Hardy turned to writing

> It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools.Anonymous My tools are terrible. Nothing works the way I want it to work. And if it does work, it takes too long to work. Maybe I should just learn to program so I can make tools that work for

In 2007, Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post [https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html] explaining his unusual approach to getting things done. He offered advice ranging from “don’t keep a schedule” so you can “work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time”—sounds

“I read your latest newsletter.” If you write one of these too, you may be familiar with the sinking feeling a statement like this evokes. What’d I do now? Am I in trouble? Once, someone called me in tears about something I’d written in the Maven Game… “When

A work ethic doesn’t come out of nowhere. In high school, the band teacher casually asked those of us in the clarinet section if anyone wanted to tackle the E♭ clarinet for a couple of pieces that year. There was a moment of silence. The E♭ clarinet is a

The offices at the gleaming Random House Tower on Broadway and West 56th Street stand empty. In 2020, book publishing has returned to being the cottage industry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system] it once was. Outside of the printing operation, everyone involved in the process of making books—

(I use “literally” twice in this newsletter. Can you tell which one is correct? Answer at the end.) There are two hard parts to writing stuff: the starting and the finishing. (Also, there’s a fiddly and often extended bit in-between, but I prefer to think of that as either

In a radical departure for this newsletter, I’m going to get a little nerdy. Prepare yourself. Years ago, before my son was born, I played video games. The new baby put an end to that as surely as he robbed me of my home office [https://mavengame.com/2020/