Agalia Tan

The trick is to surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not. In other words, don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with differently free people.

Time’s gift is experience. Experience sharpens the craft. It acts as a prediction machine, and a pattern recognizer. It cuts through the extraneous. It moves decisively. It supercharges intuition. It’s a long-range antennae for spotting opportunity and potential. It broadens the intellectual and emotional palette from which to draw from. It provide... See more

value practice over perfection.

By drawing lines in the sand around your values, your expectations, your emotional well-being, and your belief systems, you’re not just protecting yourself—you’re defining yourself. You’re signalling both who you are and who you want your tribe to be.

I’ve ultimately realised that the best way to let others know about your work is to get rid of the word ‘promote’ altogether - it just isn’t a good fit for what creative people do. Instead, I like to tell people what my work is about, and let them make up their own minds. There’s no force, no pushiness required, and everyone involved can come away ... See more

When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip, we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people's choices — or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose.

The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.

It’s research, but not in a traditional sense of research. It’s almost like a personal philosophy research or something. It’s how you form your opinions about a specific category of things. The terms I use most often are “textured” and “resonant” — I think when you see collections that have been cared for over many years and have a very specific vi... See more