Justyna Dorsz – Page 11

The Strangest Secret

You know, I have never really thought about my goals. And I know now that to be successful you should have clearly defined goals. But it certainly wasn’t something obvious to me for a very long time.

I’ve just read “The Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale. It’s very short, you can get it for $1 on Amazon or listen to it for free. Don’t be surprised by the quality, it’s from the year 1956:

“People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going,” says Earl Nightingale. And then, “Plant your goal in your mind. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make in your entire life.”

I know a lot of people hate these kinds of motivational speeches or so-called self-help books. Maybe because this is all obvious to them. To me, however, a lot of that stuff feels new. My family has never talked about settings goals. When I was in high school, and then at university, no teacher ever said anything about goals. I don’t remember my friends talking about it either. I didn’t even know that I was going through my life without any direction — I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I only found out about it later, from books, and YouTube, and blogs. I wish I had access to all those things years ago.

Conformity — people acting like everyone else, without knowing why or where they are going.
—Earl Nightingale

If you don’t have a goal, if you feel aimless — “The Strangest Secret” might be good for you.

Is Threadless worth it?

I know how it is. Every few weeks, you hear about yet another website where you should be selling your designs. And you wonder, Is it worth my time?

If you have ever submitted your designs to any Print-On-Demand websites, you know that it takes a lot of time. And sometimes, after all that effort, you see no sales. Worse, some of those websites may disappear after a while and stop paying out royalties to artists. It happened to me twice.

It’s understandable that you ask yourself, Should I invest my time in yet another website? Is Threadless worth it?

If you are scanning this article to find the answer, then here it is: Yes! You absolutely should submit your designs to Threadless.

I have been selling my art on Threadless for the past 5 years. No other website has brought me as much money in passive income as Threadless. The beginning was tough — I wasn’t making much money right away. It might be the same for you. But don’t get discouraged, keep making designs — the more you submit, the more likely it is that you will be successful.

8 Tips for Selling on Threadless.
Open your Threadless Artist Shop
What happens when Threadless selects your design?

Roam Research – Templates

I make notes about all the books and articles that I read, about anything useful that I learn. I note down all my ideas, I plan my future projects, I write down notes from courses I take. And while I work I chronicle the process.

For all that I use Roam Research. It’s kind of like my second brain. I wrote a bit about it before.

One feature that I’ve found out about recently is: Templates. When you keep writing the same things over and over again you can use templates to speed up the process. For example, when I read a book and want to add it to my Roam, I create a new page for that book. And then I add notes: the author, keywords, sometimes quotes. Now however I can create a template so that notes for each book follow the same structure.

The format for the template is:

The first line is key: you need a trigger to be able to use your template, and you need to add “#roam/templates” to specify that it’s a template.

I created a new page in Roam called “Roam Templates” to keep all my templates there and added the first template The template is for book notes, the trigger is — “book”:

All the sub-blocks: “Title”, “Author”, etc, are the content of the template.

Now that my template is declared I can use it wherever I want.

I go to another page that I created for the book “Annihilation” which I’ve read recently. To use the template I need to call a trigger, you do that by writing a semicolon twice: “;;”

When I write “;;” I get the list of all my templates. For now, there’s only one template: “book”. I select it, press enter, and my template shows up:

Now I can simply add all the data I want to have here. And then I can use the same template for other books.

What to do to live longer

The topic that has absorbed me recently is — longevity. It’s something that I have always been interested in because, well, I want to live a very long time. And if aging is stopped completely in our lifetime and it’s possible to live indefinitely, I want that too.

Watch this talk by David Sinclair:

David Sinclair is a biologist working on extending the human lifespan. It’s still a fledgling branch of science, and it’s, of course, not possible to stop — and reverse — aging. Yet. But he and other scientists are convinced that it’s only a matter of time.

There are things you can already do to live longer and be healthier. Here are two that Sinclair practices:

Intermittent fasting
Supplementing with NMN (Nicotinamide Mononucleotide)

Intermittent fasting is a strategy of scheduled fasting and eating. There are different methods, and you will need to do your own research and find what best works for you. I’ve been practicing it for over a year now. I usually fast at least once a week for 36 hours, sometimes more. But I don’t torture myself. I can easily fast for 20 hours, but after that — if I am very hungry — I eat and then try fasting on a later day.

I’ve not tried NMN yet. I don’t know that much about it, need to do more reading. David Sinclair takes 1g of NMN per day. You can buy it without a prescription. It’s expensive though, and ideally, I would like to be able to afford it for my whole family, not just for myself. The prices will go down once it’s more mainstream.

Related readings:
Rewinding the Clock
Longevity FAQ

What gets measured, gets managed

I don’t remember when I’ve first heard or read the words: “What gets measured, gets managed”. I thought it was something Ray Dalio said, but I just checked, and it seems the words are attributed to Peter Drucker (I don’t know who that is). Nevertheless — I like the principle.

I just checked how many designs I made this year — 21! I only made 21 designs, and there have already been 19 weeks this year. That means I barely made one design a week. That’s a lot less than I thought. I am not as productive as I want to be.

Can your output be measured?

Annihilation and foreshadowing

A friend lent me a book, “Annihilation” by Jeff VanderMeer, and I’ve read it today. While I was reading, I kept thinking, “This is a book that makes you want to be a writer”. The book is strange — which is the best kind of book. And the ending doesn’t explain anything at all — which is the best kind of ending.

One of the things I love in books and movies is: foreshadowing, which is: hinting at future events.

It’s a neat device to keep a reader hooked. I like when authors use that. I hadn’t realized what a powerful tool foreshadowing was until I tried reading “Pet Sematary” by Stephen King. I didn’t like it, nothing was happening, I was about to put it down and never finish it — which is always a tough choice because I feel compelled to finish books once I start reading them — but then, in the middle of the happiest, most carefree chapter:

And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously.

I had to keep reading. I don’t remember that much of the book, and yet that one line stuck with me.

But no book did better work of foreshadowing than my favorite, “Little, Big”:

In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, (…)

This is when Smoky arrives at Alice’s home for the first time, and they are about to get married. I kept reading with that word — anguish — on my mind.

Back to “Annihilation”. In the first paragraph we already get:

Looking out over the untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

And a few pages later:

I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two.

The book kept doing that — alluding to what was about to happen, never giving too much away. I knew I was being manipulated. I didn’t mind.

I checked VanderMeer’s wikipedia page to see what else he has written, and in the personal life section I read:

When VanderMeer was 20, he read Angela Carter‘s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which he has said “blew the back of my head off, rewired my brain: I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page.”

I’ve never heard of Angela Carter so then I checked her page and from there I wandered to an article about her which was written by someone deeply affected by her works. I read the whole article, decided that she was a writer whose books I wanted to read, and only then did I scroll back to the top to see who wrote it — and it was Jeff VanderMeer. She made an impact on him — he read and puzzled over all her books to try to learn what made her such a unique writer.

Now, I would love to read “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman”, but I don’t want to spend my days reading books. I am adding it to my to-read list for now, but if “I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page” is not intriguing praise, I don’t know what is. I suspect I am more likely to read it sooner rather than later.

Every image is a sum of its parts

You guys know that my brother and I have been working on our cat book. Each page takes a while.

You start with a rough sketch:

On top of it you create a cleaner sketch:

And then you keep adding details. Some things you can draw from memory. But if you are unsure how something looks you find references and take photos of things that you want to add. Here I took a photo of a plant spray bottle and then drew it:

I googled strawberries and then sketched them too using photos as references:

I searched for various plants and flowers for inspiration:

And I even used one of my designs with two cats and added them to the image:

And that’s how the whole drawing is made 🙂

Almost passive income

It would be great to have a truly passive income — you work on something once and then it keeps generating money forever. But that’s of course not the case. Passive income is never truly completely passive. However, it’s almost passive. That’s still good — it keeps generating income while you sleep — but it does require some maintenance every now and then.

My brother and I made a few games. They are being sold on Steam. Every day a few people buy them. And so we keep getting paid even though we are not actively working on them anymore. But sometimes there’s an elusive bug that someone reports, and we need to fix it. Or people keep requesting new translations. Sure, we can not respond, but it’s better to patch and update the game so that players are happy.

Same with an apparel store. You could make a lot of designs and add them to your Threadless or TeePublic shop and you will keep earning money. But there are things you should do if you want to maintain the same level of profits. For example, suddenly people start searching for specific themes like, say, “social distancing”, so you could check which of your designs can be tagged with those keywords. Or new products or colors are added and you should enable them in your shop.

In fact, Threadless has just added new products for all Artist Shops — Classic Fleece Pullovers and Hoodies. So if you have a shop, you could go there now and enable your designs on those new products. It’s worth your time because the classic fleece colors are very nice, I think they will sell well. If you are unsure how to enable those products I wrote a mini-tutorial. And Threadless wrote a blog post about it, too.

#200

Seth Godin wrote:

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.
“The first 1000 are the most difficult”

This is my 200th blog post and I report that I am glad I write this blog.

The beginning was difficult. It took me hours to write a post. Some days I really didn’t have any idea of what to write about, and I would start panicking in the evenings. But I always wrote something, even just a short note about a new design. And now not only is writing a lot easier but also I don’t worry about running out of ideas for posts anymore.

I don’t plan on stopping. Yes, it takes time to write all those posts. But I see many benefits:

I got better at writing. I have a long way to go to be a good writer. But I am better at it than I was 200 blog posts ago.
I connected with other bloggers and artists! A few people who read my blog wrote to me and it has been great chatting with them.
I got to share my process for making and selling designs, and a few designers told me it was helpful.
It inspired me to consider other writing-related projects like maybe writing an e-book. More on that soon.
This blog is also a place where I promote my online apparel stores, like my Threadless and TeePublic shops, and the games that I made with my brother.

You could write a blog too. In 200 posts, you will most likely report that you are glad you did it.

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