Authenticity

What does it mean for something to be 'authentic'?

Just before he stepped down as CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos wrote his final shareholder letter. He closed it out with a section he titled, “Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical.” He prefaced his own thoughts with a quote from The Blind Watchmaker, “if living things [don’t] work actively to... See more

Patrick OShaughnessy x.com

andrea

Voice isn’t only about what you sound like and what you say; it’s also about how you deliver it. As Rebecca Solnit describes it, a writer’s voice is “something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for.”

Cortney Cassidy • A soft manifesto

sari

“I think one of the marks of maturity […] - is the willingness to be seen exactly as I am. As we grow more settled and mature, we become less hidden to others, more transparent to ourselves as well as to each other. With this growing authenticity comes a deepening of intimacy with each... See more

lili

Pretty much everything in life is like this: there are some ways you can show up that just feel better. And when you show up for the truest and most beautiful version of your life that you can imagine, you feel excited and alive.

Ava • Not Disappointing Myself

Stuart Evans

“[On one end, you have] auto-tune that perfectly puts music into tune…which is sort of flawless and faultless. [In contrast, the other side] is clumsy, awkward, crude and unfinished things that we all actually like in the right context.

The reason we like the Velvet Underground is not for their gloss. It's for their roughness. For the feeling we... See more

aandrea

Brian Eno on why we’re drawn to the new and authentic

Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice to the process of experiencing it—how we feel, not what we’re feeling, making lucid that which usually eludes full expression.

Dirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...

Keely Adler

alex

“I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.”

–Frank Ghery

Alara

Compulsion. I think about that word a lot. I believe that all of us, carelessly walking about planet earth, are intrinsically compelled to do something . It’s in our nature, in the shape of our soul. To excel, to truly be the best, I think it’s crucial to spend time thinking about what that is. Because if you do something other than that, you’re... See more

Dan Shipper • How David Perell Uses ChatGPT as a Creative Partner

aandrea

the path to excellence is aligning what you do with who you are. Lean in, or better still, dive in, headfirst. The first step is to look inward and think deeply about who you are and what you’re made to do.