Mission & purpose

As the hero, you get to stand up to those notions and reframe who you are. You get to teach those around you about who you have become. And this last phase—the landing, the integration, the return—cannot be avoided. Because if you refuse to return home, if you refuse to integrate, then your life just gets heavier. You end up with all of this... See more

When I tell the others about what you do, do I feel smart or stupid? Can you establish the conditions where sharing your core ideas and mission is tempting, generous and affirming for the people you need to have talk about it? If your name or logo get in the way of that, please change it.

The negotiation between these two was the generative act. The patron's capital and ambition, the painter's skill and stubbornness. They were locked in a generative argument about what the thing should be, and what emerged was a product of that argument — not of anyone's judgment, but of their shared labor.

The jump ball between the loose grip and the tight grip is settling, and it's settling towards the tight grip, towards the transcendent. I don't see another mechanism strong enough to prevent everyone from going crazy. Our referees are gone. They've gone insane themselves and are spattered with blood and entrails and running around the streets... See more

Given that your project isn’t for everyone, the goal isn’t for everyone to understand it. The goal is for people who might take action to understand it enough that they will take action. Every great brand that I know of has as the unspoken next line in their brief: “This might not be for you.”

Where is the tension? What will happen if I don’t do something right now? What if I keep quiet? What is imminent, what will I miss? The default is the status quo, the standard response is, “maybe later.” If you don’t create tension, there will be no change.

Ever since the Second World War ended, we have spent decades holding everything with a loose grip. Loose-grip conviction is comfortable and it allows us to participate in every conversation, to be perfectly hedged in every order of life. It allows you to keep one foot in the market and one foot in the critique of the market and never commit to... See more

A brand is not a logo. A brand is a promise, a story and a shorthand. A brand tells us what to expect the next time we engage with you.

Being named Fred is not a brand. Fred is your name, not your promise. If you’re an unreliable, selfish hustler, that’s your brand.

Patronage was anything but taste. Patronage was a relationship between capital and artistic labor so intimate that the two were functionally a single body. The patron did not select from finished works on a wall, allocating neat sums of money to purchase them. The patron animated the work before it existed.