J. Danielle

Every year I felt more certain that to succeed in an atomized consumer culture was to fail as a human being.

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to

switch polarity

entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I meet people with new ideas.