anti-perfectionism
Keely Adler and
anti-perfectionism
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
— Robert Hughes, 1996
— Robert Hughes, 1996
Dylan O'Sullivan • Tweet
I’m reminded of two seemingly contradictory insights I came across in my research. The first was from a study of NIH grant applicants, which concluded that scientists who nearly missed out on grants early in their careers systematically outperformed their peers who received the grants over the long term. “Overall, these findings are consistent with
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The second was a point from David Foster Wallace’s iconic This Is Water speech: Whatever you worship will eventually eat you alive. “If you worship money and things…then you will never feel you have enough,” he writes. “Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will
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“If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own.”
—Richard Rohr
—Richard Rohr
Steve Schlafman 🐌 • Tweet
While doing the reporting for my book, I read a postmortem from a successful startup founder. They said something along the lines of: “One of the best things that can happen to you is to achieve professional success when you’re young. That way you can learn that it does little to change your happiness.” For better or worse, achieving your goals
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"Artifacts of humanity" in creative work — in the form of dust, mistakes, and deliberate strokes that flex human engagement — will showcase the human labor spent making a creation. Such artifacts of humanity, alongside Content Credentials that factually articulate how a piece of work was made, will add meaning and scarcity to the work in the eyes... See more
Scott Belsky • The Law of Displacement Speed & Leveraging Artifacts of Humanity
Now the internet has given us access to all of it, all at once, and none of it in its real, embodied, sensually lived and shared forms