Escaping the Algorithm (developing taste)
“Be intentional with your influences—what you consume shapes what you create.
1. Choose your Big 5. Who are the people whose mindset, work, and values align with where you want to go? Write their names down.
2. Prioritize their content. Before consuming anything else, engage with their work first—books, podcasts, videos, posts. Let their thinking sha
... See moreAn Albert Einstein quote: “Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”
Even though on the Internet, we’re just a click away from t... See more
Attend to your influences.
I suppose this is the ur-message - to be more aware of what’s influencing you and how. Acknowledge just how much of what you think, feel and do is picked up from others, consciously and unconsciously, and try to become more conscious of more of them. Artists pay attention to this because they love their influences, while a
“The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your re
... See moreAI can generate a thousand articles while I drink my morning coffee. But it can't tell me which ones matter. It can't feel the resonance of a perfect sentence or know why a particular image stops me in my tracks.
That's what I do now. I collect resonance. Not information - we're drowning in that - but the stuff that makes my soul hum at a different
... See moreFind research that..
has nothing to do with what you’re working on, but is interesting
looks like what you’re interested in, but is different in content
is similar to what you’re interested in, but is very different
is in a very different discipline or medium, but has a similar idea to what you’re interested in
is written by someone else who m... See more
“Because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in.”
From The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
Interrogate your influences.
We all have favourite influencers and influences - people we know, celebrities, artists, friends, writers, and uh, influencers. Books, TV shows, movies. Most of the time we’re happy just to accept that those are the people and things we admire and seek to emulate. But what artistic careers show us is the importance of p
... See more