In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reebok were all selling more shoes. So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest. The winner was a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. “Two days after the... See more
I now understand that sometimes we have talents in precisely the areas that are most challenging to us. Strikes me that this is far more normal than being a total natural or a supernatural savant.
If you feel like you do your art in spite of yourself, you ain’t alone, welcome to the club.
Increasingly, the work that stand out will be more raw and incomplete (because — by definition — new ideas haven’t been optimized because…they are new).
Eno explains:
"[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... See more