LOOK ELSEWHERE

It’s too hard. And too easy, sometimes.

Nowadays - if you lack creative inspiration, you Google or Youtube the same inspiration to kickstart your mind.

You look up what Gary Vee or Hormozi is posting. You see how Apple designs its pages. You choose the trending CapCut templates.

These are solid, trusted, and working - for them.

However, they’ve got distribution up the wazoo. As growing creators, we’ve got to differentiate ourselves in our market to stand out.

Look outside of your market.

Go outside and live your life. Check out other people’s social feeds.

Take inventory of what catches your eye.

Think about your favorite places to eat, album covers, or t-shirts you walk by.

Mine this week?

Website inspo from my favorite sandwich shop in Southern CA (that I’m missing every single day).

A beautiful display of a bold, funky font I wouldn’t think to use unless I’d seen it. A perfect use of white space. A mouth-watering image of a sandwich dripping with sauce.

It immediately makes me want to catch a flight home to CA to eat it.

CANVA STILL WINS

The best designers nowadays don’t only rip on Adobe products. (They’d still say they’re better, though).

Canva is the greatest tool on the internet to help beginners create killer graphic design.

The templates they offer are utterly insane, of course.

But the entire platform is one big thing: approachable.

Anybody who has basic understanding of internet tools can figure out how to 10x their current design skills in a single day.

I’ve been a paying member of Canva Pro every month for 5 years.

A new tool I’m playing with?

Canva’s AI image tool →

WRITE GOODER

Stop writing like you’re trying to get an A on a term paper.

Your high-school English teacher’s opinion doesn’t matter anymore.

People don’t read like that on the internet anyway.

Drop the grade level down.

Stop using fancy words - AKA “technobabble”.

Skip lines every 1-2 sentences.

Utilize:

• Conversational slang to “spit on that thang”

• bullet points to break up ideas

• bold fonts and underlines to break up the flow

• white space in how your copy lays on the page

You’re writing (and creating) for two things:

1. To be understood

2. To make the reader/consumer feel understood

Simplify your copy game to scale your distribution.

DON’T LET ‘EM PUT YOU IN A BOX

We all attach names, masks, and ideas to the person we think we’re supposed to be.

But we can change every single thing about our persona in an instant if we choose to.

Take Colson Baker for example.

Most know him as Machine Gun Kelly.

He started as a tatted-up, “white boy” rapper from Cleveland who took colleges by storm for 7 years under the hip-hop umbrella.

Then his creative demons led him to something else - the album that made everybody realize that he isn’t just a “white boy” rapper - but a true musical artist.

And so he dove into alternative rock with his album, Tickets To My Downfall.

Now?

He’s just going by mgk.

“Machine Gun Kelly was who I needed to be then. It’s not who I need to be as an artist or father of a 14-year-old little girl now.”

His latest work?

A brilliant cover of Zach Bryan in the country genre - Sun To Me.

My childhood dream was to be the starting shortstop for the New York Yankees. My walk-up song would be something like…

• Mary Jane’s Last Dance by Tom Petty

• All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix

• Can’t Stop by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

… But that dream didn’t really work out.

So here’s what I listened to this week to make my latest dreams come to life: