You’ve probably heard by now that we’re all getting dumber. Our ability to focus is slipping away. We hear in the news that the IQ of young people today is, for the first time on record, lower than their parents’ IQ . AI is waiting with open arms to offload all of your boring, laborious thoughts, like AUTO, the destruction-bent autopilot in WALL-E. Our phones are sucking away our life force like…
A mole lived underground. Every morning he woke with one dream: to see the sky. He would look up at the ceiling of his tunnel and think, one day I will see the sky. His neighbors shook their heads. "There is no sky," they said. "There is only dirt. The sky is brown. Be grateful for what you can reach." Then one day a rabbit traveler passed through the mole community. "The sky is not brown," the…
The music industry doesn't reject most musicians. It simply never hears from them. Think about what you picture when you imagine breaking through. An A&R rep stumbles onto your Spotify. A playlist curator finds your track. A producer hears your name whispered in the right room at the right moment. The industry discovers you. That mental representation is the problem. Not because it never happens,…
He didn't own Charlie Brown. He didn't own Snoopy. He didn't even get to name the strip. United Feature Syndicate's terms were standard for the era: 100% of the rights, or no deal. Schulz was 27, unknown outside St. Paul, and needed the platform. So he signed. The syndicate also told Schulz that his title, “Li'l Folks” had to go. It was too close to an existing strip. They renamed it “Peanuts,”…
Well, that was a week. I went to Washington, D.C. to give a paper at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) conference and do research at the Smithsonian. The research is for Sway, my book arguing that promotion didn't just circulate American music, it shaped artists' images, legacies, and sometimes the music itself. The Ellington chapter is that argument made…
There's a note-taking problem that nobody talks about. It's not that people don't take notes. Most of us take too many. We highlight. We screenshot. We copy-paste entire articles into Notion folders we'll never open again. We dog-ear pages and stick Post-it notes to things and then wonder, six months later, why none of it ever turned into anything. I've been thinking about this a lot lately,…
It’s been one of those days. You are creatively blocked. No juices flowing. No ideas. Your mind spins in an endless loop, going nowhere. The canvas stays blank. The strings on your guitar sound flat. The cursor blinks at you with a sneer. This is what creative paralysis feels like. Being locked inside your skull, unable to move. I want to suggest an age old solution to your creative block: go on a…
In The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin tells the story of his early days training in Push Hands, a Tai Chi practice. He had a classmate named Evan, and every time they stepped onto the mat, Evan smashed him around. Not once or twice—every session, for months. It was humbling. Sometimes humiliating. But Waitzkin kept coming back. Because he knew that the fastest way to grow wasn’t to avoid these…
If you were to visit my office and look around, you might notice my obsession with note cards. 4x6 inch notecards are seemingly everywhere. In stacks on my desk, more on my shelves. Stuck to the pinboard on my wall. Note cards taped to my computer monitor. A stack of blank note cards is always within arm’s reach. I get asked every so often about how I do my research, and today I’m going to share…
In the weeks after being featured on Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” made $2.3 million from streaming alone. It climbed the Spotify charts, became the sixth biggest song in the world for 2022, and was featured in over 2 million TikTok videos. It even earned her a Guinness World Record: the longest time it’s ever taken a song to reach No. 1 in the UK—36 years and 310…
The legend says artists must suffer. That fame and fortune come only after death. That struggle is always noble, and successful artists always sell out. That’s nonsense. In 1850, Jenny Lind stepped off a ship into New York Harbor and into a nation already obsessed with her. She was a soprano from Sweden, called "The Swedish Nightingale." The Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, was the most famous…
To do your best creative work, you have to go somewhere most people never go. Imagine there’s work that can only be done at the bottom of the ocean. Not in the shallows. Not mid-descent. But down deep—where the pressure is high and the surface world disappears. That’s the Deep Sea Diving Framework for creative work. There are certain kinds of work—writing, composing, painting, designing, coding,…
Do you believe in luck? More to the point, do you believe that you can do anything to make you luckier in your creative career? To catch more lucky breaks? You probably have someone in your life who always seems to somehow get lucky. Things just seem to work out for them. They go to a coffee shop and end up meeting the CEO of a company and getting a job offer. They go out on the town and somehow…
It's graduation season, and in my day job, I teach in the Music Department at Central Washington University. Last night we had a ceremony for the music graduates, and I gave a talk on how to live a fulfilling life. Maybe you need to hear something from this talk as well. Here it is: How to Live a Fulfilling Life: CWU Music Graduate Commencement Speech, 2025 Dr. Mark Samples June 9, 2025, 7 p.m.…
Whatever you think of her music, you have to respect Taylor Swift as a creative professional. Last week she pulled off something no one thought was possible. Back in 2005, Swift signed a six-album deal with Big Machine Records when she was just 15. The deal gave the label ownership of the master recordings for all six albums. When her contract ended in 2018, she walked—signing with Universal…
In the early 1990s, Johnny Cash was a living legend that no one wanted to hear. The industry had moved on. Nashville had shelved him. Columbia Records had dropped him. Radio wouldn’t play his new music. To those in the industry, he seemed like a relic. But Rick Rubin got curious. Rubin wasn’t a country producer. He had built his reputation on hip-hop and hard rock. But something in Cash’s voice—a…
To create something truly original, strip away assumptions and analogies and create from first principles. We live in a golden age of creative templates. There’s a swipe file for every format. A prompt for every block. A Notion dashboard for every creator’s dream. We’ve never had more creative tools at our fingertips—and yet many smart, ambitious creatives feel stuck, derivative, or worse:…
It’s March 2020. The world is in lockdown. And Taylor Swift decides it’s the perfect time to shake things up. She sends a message to Aaron Dessner, of The National: “Hey, it’s Taylor. Would you ever be up for writing songs with me?” Aaron had met Taylor before, but this seemed out of the blue. Dessner, at the start of the pandemic, had found himself in an unexpected creative surge. With tours on…
If you’re working on something good — something real — it’s easy to think that’s enough. That your music will speak for itself. Your design. Your writing. That someone will stumble across it, fall in love, and spread the word. Maybe. But probably not. As Austin Kleon writes in his book Show Your Work: “You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. “But it’s not enough to be good.…
So many great music producers are somehow chill and high-agency at the same time. Here’s a story about benny blanco and Ed Sheeran that shows how it's done. So, the industry folks say, “Hey benny, you should work with this guy Ed Sheeran.” Benny hears Ed’s track “A-Team” and is like, “I want to work with this guy right away.” But instead of the usual corporate email, benny hits the entire email…