-
“As soon as they like you, make them unlike you…”
“A lot of people you see on the internet HAVE to be on the internet.” Donald Glover, Interview Magazine Recently, Rolling Loud festival announced that headliner artist Ye has dropped out of their festival. A lot of Ye fans are, rightfully, righteously indignant—this is the second time this year he has dropped out, last minute,…
-
Lloyd Banks, on inspiration from magazines
Obviously 50 is my favorite member of G-Unit, but Banks comes in at a close second. At GQ, he talks about how he found departure points for his songs from print magazines: [At home] I had probably somewhere between 600 and 700 rap magazines. That was my process: I would flip through them while I…
-
Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the Paris Expo, which over…
-
Pricing, in magnitudes
I recently came across a speech by the son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, Alexandre Arnault, who describes the very classic brand Tiffany and Co., where he now works as an EVP: We try to be super accessible. We want to be a place where everybody can get in the store and find something for…
-
Most dreams stay dreams
I recently revisited a piece I wrote at the blog in March, “To all the dreams I dreamed before.” It’s a precious piece to me, because it was one of the blocks I’d experienced early in my life; I felt unqualified, unready, and undeserving to even aspire to do the things I wanted to do,…
-
The classroom parable
At Twitter, entrepreneur Kevin Lee shares an anecdote about how a family business owner, which worked in electricity, turned extra space in its warehouse into a community-based classroom for immigrant workers to learn electrical engineering. That meant every Saturday, for four hours, immigrant workers could attend this free class to learn electrical engineering skills. Hundreds…
-
Reversing Medium’s brain drain problem
After 10 years of leading Medium, CEO Ev Williams is stepping down. Medium faces a lot of challenges—I am sure Williams will reflect on many—but to me the main one is basically a way worse version of the problem that Substack currently faces: brain drain, a term used to describe “the emigration of highly trained…
-
Yeezy as a turnkey luxury brand
Building a luxury brand is difficult. But luxury brands are the way of the future (better margins, stronger branding, improved longevity, cultural relevance, increased desirability—I want to explain this more in another piece!); every business will need to be or own an upscale brand, the same way that Toyota has Lexus, and Honda has Acura.…
-
Instrumentalizing creativity
Creativity is best played as an infinite game; winning means you get to keep playing. This stands out in contrast to the convention of playing a game as a finite game; winning means you get to declare victory over your opponents, and stop playing. For creators, here are some elements to enable you to play…
-
Creativity as an infinite game
Writing a book was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The next-best decision was to write something I wanted to make. That may sound dead simple to you, but to me, it wasn’t. I experienced what my friend Hamza Khan calls “marketing brain”, which he describes as, “We think about the product, we…