Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

The Dip

If you’ve been on Instagram for a few years, your followers are probably made up of people you know. Friends, family, acquaintances. This creates a strange scenario if you’re thinking about posting consistent content to grow your audience.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Top 5 People

Business podcasters try to convince us to spend time with people who have more money than us. But if my wife and brothers and best friend aren’t millionaires, what am I supposed to do? Stop spending time with them?

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Murders, Marathons, and Mental Toughness

To see my "self" not as myself but as another “self” that I control. One I must listen to and choose to work with and be kind to. But one who is another one. One who is not me, but instead, a future me, or a past me, or a parallel me—all who have, at one point, asked me to drive them…

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

How to actually post consistent content

I posted more than 100 short-form videos last year. And I’ll post 365 more videos this year. How am I so confident, even though my motivation is dwindling? It’s because I don’t rely on motivation. I rely on a system.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Freewrite Alpha Review

The Freewrite Alpha is a romantic machine. It looks and sounds like a typewriter. It can go off the grid. It’s the kind of thing you can hammer away on at a coffee shop and turn the heads of a few hipsters.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Mundane action with radical consistency 

I don’t brush my teeth every day, but once a year I spend all day brushing them to remove all the plaque at once. Do you see how ridiculous this sounds? Yet we apply this strategy to many areas of our lives.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

PSA: post short-form video content

I often encounter photographers, graphic designers, and writers who refuse to post short-form video content. They miss the old days of Instagram, when images were king, and their content performed without them having to try very hard.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Optimize for Trust

When a client trusts you, you can follow your vision to an interesting creative end.

When a client trusts you, they'll happily pay more to work with you, instead of your competition.

When a client trusts you, they'll buy you the time you need to do a good job, and even understand when there are delays.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Why you're afraid of Gen Alpha

“Generation Alpha” has been emerging as a term on the internet in recent months. Lots of people saw a viral video titled “The world isn’t ready for Gen Alpha.” It showed two twelve year olds saying funny words while subtly bullying each other.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Why your ideas never work

You can either say “Well, I tried,” and accept the plausible deniability. It isn’t in your court anymore after all. Other people dropped the ball, yeah? It’s not on you, right? Or you can take radical responsibility.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Realistic Goals Never Changed A Thing

“When you set giant, unrealistic goals, the delta between the actions you’re currently taking and the actions you would need to take to reach that giant goal become glaringly obvious.”

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Your body wants to scream 

It was fascinating to see the impact that even a 15-minute delay to his nap schedule had on his ability to cope. Small changes in his diet and dinner schedule were detrimental to his ability to stave off a meltdown. It got me thinking that we aren’t so different.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Big brands don’t care about your portfolio

Photographers and videographers (and all sorts of creative freelancers) spend tons of time tinkering with their portfolios, hoping that big brands will notice. What they don’t realize is that big brands are searching for something beyond just good work.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

4 Lessons From a Viral Video

One of my videos is earning tens of thousands of views on Instagram. And counting. Amidst the scramble to respond to comments and messages, I’ve pulled a few lessons from this experience that I’d like to share.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Be where your people are

Wherever the folks in your industry are spending time, you need to spend time there too. I’ll add, it doesn’t matter which end of the industry. Clients and colleagues are equally as important in the freelance game.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

Be a Co-Creator in Your Pain

Life is painful. It’s hard. And no doubt, writing and workouts make it harder. But that is a portion of the pain that we own. We’re co-creators in the pain. We’re still choosing this.

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Reese Hopper Reese Hopper

The New Freelancer’s Advantage: Attunement

There’s a study in which different people were tasked with interpreting an email. Those deemed in “high-power” positions were much worse at understanding the perspective of the email sender than those in “low-power” positions.

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