Welcome to My Blog
P.S. I apologize for all the older posts on this blog. They were written a lifetime ago, when I was much younger and more naive, and thought I knew a lot more than I actually did.
What AI Hasn't Changed: A Review of the Boring Basics from an Old Guy
It's been more than ten years since I wrote a marketing blog post. Since then I co-founded two companies and ran both of them, got cancer, got better, and went quiet for a long while. I came back to writing this summer, and the first thing I wanted to do wasn't to have a take. It was to take inventory. Everyone I follow has spent the last year telling me that everything changed. And plenty did. I can build in a weekend what used to take a funded team a quarter. That part is real, and I'm not going to be the guy who pretends it isn't. But here's the sentence I keep coming back to: AI changed the cost of building. It didn't change the cost of being wrong. If anything, it made being wrong more dangerous.Keep reading →
I Need You to Know That I Had Cancer and Survived
I did not want to write this article. Not one bit. I'm writing it now because I know that if I don't, I'll never write it. I found out I had cancer in March of 2020.Keep reading →
New Blog: Hi
Welcome. This is my new home on the internet. I've spent the last couple of decades building things. Leadpages. Nomics (exited). The Interactive Offer. And a long list of projects in between, some of which worked and plenty of which didn't. And then, for a while, I went quiet.Keep reading →
My Story (i.e. About Clay Collins)
Written on December 5, 2010 (i.e. a long time ago) and posted here for posterity. Hi, my name is Clay Collins, and the sad truth is that my "about page" has never been fully transparent.Keep reading →
Why the Job-ification of Your Passion Can Be the Ticket to Hating Your Life
About two months ago I wrote about how I'd quit my job and was going for broke. I'm happy to report that since then, things are going better than ever. I'm making more than I ever have before, I have unprecedented levels of free time and flexibility, and I'm the happiest I've ever been.Keep reading →
Not Being a Real Person: The #1 Self-Development Anti-Hack
A friend of mine used to cut her own hair. But occasionally she'd have her hair done by a professional. She referred to this as having her hair cut by a "real person" and she'd sometimes say things like: "I really like having my hair cut by a real person." The term caught.Keep reading →
When Crazy Isn't Crazy Anymore: Life Balance and Insanity
[Note: Bear with me here at the beginning. The second half is better than the first]. Conventional wisdom says that a well-balanced meal contains all the major food groups. On the contrary, nutritional research indicates that nutritional balance just isn't necessary during each meal. Balance among the food groups isn't even necessary over the course of a day. In fact, nutritionists generally believe that while a diet might not be balanced with regards to a particular day, what's important is that nutritional balance be achieved over the course of a week (or even two). What does nutritional balance have to do with life balance?Keep reading →
Alternative Lifestyle Designing (The Rabbit Hole Tax and Baselining)
A few months ago, I met a guy named Leonard Knight who's spent the last 20 years building a folk art masterpiece called "Salvation Mountain." Leonard lives in the back of his pickup truck and usually sleeps under the stars. Visitors bring him food, paint, and minor donations, and Leonard continues to work on his adobe mountain and ~200 other folk art projects meant to convey the message that "God Loves Everyone." Leonard's mountain has been likened to an epic work of folk art "comparable to the Watts Towers," was entered into the Congressional Record as a national treasure, and was also featured in the movie Into the Wild. While I don't seek to emulate Leonard's lifestyle, I very much respect him for having the guts to pursue his dreams. Leonard's life is highly unconventional and wouldn't work for most of us, but it got me thinking about . . .Keep reading →
Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack
Modern life has us enmeshed in a web of unwanted and unnecessary commitments. Most of us spend the majority of our time doing things we don't want to do. We join committees because we think they'll look good on our resumes, go to birthday parties out of obligation, attend inane meetings, stay in bad relationships out of fear, take on unwanted work projects to gain favor with our bosses, stay in jobs we don't like instead of quitting.Keep reading →
Healthy, Wealthy, and DEAD?: 5 Reasons Why Getting Up Early Might be Harmful
It is accepted dogma (perhaps even holy writ) among more than a few personal development writers that getting up early leads to increased productivity. Becoming an early riser has become something of a rite of passage for productivity gurus, and articles on how to become an early riser have been among the first written (and most popular) posts by self-help bloggers such as Steve Pavlina. There's even an entire blog devoted to waking up early, and the blog claims that "any person who…sets serious goals in his/her life turns to rising early, sooner or later."Keep reading →
