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

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To take it a bit further, he teased out those traits saying that both artists and entrepreneurs...

“...Want to express themselves.

Want to do something differently.

Want to create something better than what’s ever been done before.

They are disruptive.

They live in the theater of risk.

They want to change the world...”

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.

But the only way we can create something out of thin air is because we've built our own system (even if it's just in our minds) that allows us to capture material and references over a lifetime. We then connect these fragments and "milk" them for unexpected connections, which ultimately leads us to truly original ideas.

marketing = sharing the essence of your work with other beings

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

Don’t worry about finding the perfect system. It doesn’t exist. Start walking, experiment occasionally, and reinforce the paths that work for you.

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.