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2.5 hours with Rising Green
The other day, I spent almost 2.5 hours at The Met with Lee Krasner’s “Rising Green.” The experience felt much less like looking at the work, and more like reading it. I took many notes, and eventually fewer, as the chatter in my brain quieted. I slept very well that night. This experience was prompted…
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Meme as spine (continued)
The strength and weakness in audiobooks is how passive the experience is. For me, it’s easy to forget where and how I heard something; one trick seems to be in remembering the associated time and place where I listened to an interesting point, a scene that I was seeing at the time. In any case,…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.
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Contentions: Do something nobody else can
When I first entered the marketing profession, there was a popular saying, “Every company is a media company.” The saying was punchy and catchy, and fascinating because media companies themselves were in the midst of drastic change and adaptation. For example, as a business, The New York Times looks very different today than it did…
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The aspiration capability gap
When you’re one person, practicing creative work, and you’re constantly choosing between a creative factor and a commercial factor (that provides your livelihood), it can feel extremely unfair, and even downright torturous (see Costica Bradatan). One reminder: whether you are one person, or a thousand-person company, at any given point, there will always be a…
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Opportunities are earned
If someone takes a chance on you, or you’ve found yourself with an opportunity you’re not sure you deserve, the best thing you can do—for yourself, and the other party—is earn it. In 1998, Peyton Manning signed a $48 million contract with the Indiana Colts. “People ask me what I plan to do with my…
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Gohar World
Entrepreneurs and artists Laila and Nadia Gohar built a world for their tableware products. Laila tells me that she and Nadia kind of imagine Gohar World, the Cairo-born sisters’ nine-month-old line of cheeky and exquisite host- and tableware, as a planet. Laila is standing in a voluminous white Simone Rocha skirt and snub-nosed Gucci slides…
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A meme can be a spine for your creative work
When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for. One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this: Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages…
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You are traffic
I got bored with people saying, like, “This world is shit.” It’s kind of like when people say, “Oh, this traffic is so bad.” I’m like, “You are traffic.” You can’t sit there and be like, “Oh man, the traffic was horrible. I’m sorry, I was late.” You are traffic. You’re in it. Without you,…
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Why almost everything is actually more difficult than it seems
The fluency illusion is a tendency for people to overestimate their abilities without sufficient evidence. Yale professor Woo-kyoung Ahn demonstrates this by showing students a few seconds of choreography and challenging them to imitate it. (It seems to cover a lot of ground similar to the Dunning–Kruger effect, a tendency for people with limited competence…