”When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?”

- Douglas Coupland

I have a new rule. I’m not starting any project that I wouldn’t be prepared to commit to for the next five years. I won’t work on anything that I can’t see myself doing in 5–7 years, and I am never going to try and gun for a short term pay off.

Any project that’s truly worth doing, whether it’s writing a book or starting a business, is worth putting years into. Years allow you to grow, years allow you to succeed to the best of your abilities.

It comes down to the fact that when I begin projects, I want to see them through. I want to work on them and bleed for them and put every ounce of sweat that I’ve got into them. I want to get them across the finish line.

And I have big dreams. I’ve always had big dreams. I want to put a dent in the universe, and change the world, and found a street wear brand, and I want to take on another CMO role, and I want to paint, and be published.

That’s...

By Amy Hood. Beautiful piece of work. As a creative, the balance between simplicity and complexity in skate and street art has always appealed to me. There’s such strength in the way it draws on iconography and semiotics and never actually has to go any deeper in its meaning than the aesthetic itself.

When I look at this kind of work, it sparks my own desire to make, write, draw and build in a way that so much of what we consider to be “high brow” never can. I wonder how much happier we’d be, if we could see the value in work that exists just because it’s fucking cool. Work that doesn’t have to sum up the human experience, to have worth and value. Work that can just tap into a look, a vibe and a mood.

xox Joany 🍕🍕

When I started writing on Pizza Party and abandoned Medium, I walked away from around 2,000,000 reads over an 18 month period. Simply huge stats. It was insane. And looking back, I know I certainly abandoned an interesting asset in that audience. Which was really part of the problem. I was seeing my audience as some kind of an asset.

Setting up Pizza Party on the Svbtle network and starting again from scratch has reminded me of the importance of every single individual reader, and how much it means when someone takes the time to read and engage with my work.

It’s also a wonderful opportunity to re-invent that work, and make it my own. I’m excited by that. There are questions worth considering though. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be writing on Svbtle. It’s beautiful, it’s simple, but I’m not hosting it, and that always leaves me with a sense of discomfort. The morning I set it...

I think about this a lot. When people meet me, they ask what I do for work, or where I went to school but never what pronouns I use. I’d love to see that change. My job and my school history are never going to be as important to our relationship as who I am.

For my part, I’m working on having the courage to treat my pronouns as a part of my name when I introduce myself. That’s still hard for me, but I’m doing it. It’s going to get easier, I know.

Side note - Although I have been using the Adobe suite since I was around 11 years old, I find myself able to be more creative in a shorter timeframe using tools like Canva. As a designer, I don’t feel as though my work is lessened by using a simpler tool, for a simpler task. I’ve never understood the notion of gatekeeping based on tools.

I feel the same way about all creative pursuits - the best camera is whatever camera you’ve got...

“Be who you needed when you were younger.”

Life is terrifying. We’re all grown up enough to admit that, aren’t we?

It’s terrifying and it’s challenging and it can be so overwhelming. The prospect of taking a chance, and taking a shit is daunting. Anything could happen. It’s scary to decide that you are going to make something, do something, taste something, love someone.

And so there’s a temptation to give into the fear. To hide away, and never roll the dice. To play it safe, and be safe and never risk the world falling out from under your uncertain feet.

For some of us though, the thoughts don’t just go away. The ideas don’t go away. They visit us when we least expect it, when inspiration strikes, or when boredom makes the mundanity too much to bear. And we think - but what if we did…

You don’t know for sure that the dark is going to fall, that your dreams will prove worthless, that love is out of reach. You don’t know for...

“This strategy doesn’t always play out smoothly, though. For Peder Fjällström, using Slack at home was mainly a fun experiment. A former app designer who lives in Stockholm and is starting a kombucha brand, Fjällström, initially was excited about using the software at home a couple of years after adopting it at work: He custom-built little tools within the program that would let members of his family add an item to the grocery list when something was running low, report “bugs” in the house (like a broken appliance), and determine the kids’ current location (pulled from the Find My iPhone app). On occasion, Slack was also a way for Fjällström and his wife to summon their two kids at dinnertime.

But the Slack experiment lasted only three or four months—the kids soon gravitated toward apps that were “more fun.” After some reflection, Fjällström has concluded that using Slack with his...

I was put onto this by Benjamin Law on Twitter. It’s the closest I’ve come to a transcription app that can actually make my voice notes useful. Particularly of worth when I dabble in journalism, and write interviews with other creatives. I don’t know if I can rely on it as much as paying a freelancer to handle transcription, but it’s still a promising tool.

I wonder how I’d work if I could use voice more often than I use a keyboard. I can imagine a world where I’d be able to scrawl my work with a pen or a sharpie - as I much prefer - and then read it back into perfect real-time transcription. That’s the dream.

xox Joany 🍕🍕🍕

The truth is, for the rest of your life, you are going to be running from something. It will only ever be a few steps behind, and you will feel its breath and know its teeth are snapping at your heels every day, everywhere you go. It is called loneliness. Once it has your scent, it will never give up its pursuit of you. And eventually, when you are too tired to keep running, it will take you.

Loneliness really has little to do with how many people surround you, or how many friends you have, or who you know. It runs deeper, and it speaks to the isolation of the human experience. I’ve always believed that loneliness is about something far more primal. It’s the kind of thing that you feel when you’re acutely aware of the vastness of the universe, and the smallness of everything you know.

Loneliness appears when you think about what your life means, and where it’s been, and where it’s...