Haley Helmold

Another good read: Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker . I rather liked this analogy:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way t

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most importantly: labor is not renewable. once you spend labor, you cannot get it back. energy, when given in alignment, can be generative. energy invested in the right places can create more energy.

rather than thinking about business as the exchange of value for money , instead, I’m thinking about business as:

a set of systems and processes

to help me honor my creative energy,

shared with purpose in the world.

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

May we all aspire to be as observant and confident to notice root stairs and call them root stairs, so others could then use the phrase “root stairs.”

Attention + Novelty + Creative Exposition = Insight

Recently, New York Times Magazine writer Sam Anderson and I spoke about how describing something well is both an act of incredible generosity and a literary challenge of the highest order.

The key to creating unique, targeted design solutions is found in the gap between the verbal and the visual. Therein lies the gold. It is about linking strategy and design, and transforming insight, goals and strategy into visual images, identities and experiences, which together with slogans and other communication will help to build the desired b... See more

Design becomes strategy in action.

I've seen time and time again these wonderful, intimate products and events get started in New York, and then as they try to scale... the magic is lost.