Investor and mathematician Jim Simons on beauty:

"Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. I think pretty much everything I've done has had an aesthetic component—at least to me. Now, you might think, "Building a company that's trading bonds? What's so aesthetic about that?" What's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the rig

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So, what is it that Rick Rubin does? How has he helped artists make their best music for almost half a century across such disparate genres and styles? The secret seems to be rooted in self-discovery. As Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks put it, Rubin “has the ability and the patience to let music be discovered, not manufactured”—or, to use our te

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More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Our business in living is to become fluent with…life…and art can help this.” And elsewhere: “Art…is not self expression but self alteration.” Artmaking isn’t just something we do for the outcome; it’s something we do for the process, which includes the process of becoming the person with the taste, knowledge, sensitivity, agency, and ambition to pr... See more

Human existence is characterized by a perpetual dissatisfaction, a divine discontent, with who we are now, and what our world looks like now, compared to what it could be. Change is unpredictable; we rarely know how things will turn out in the end. But we still invite it, still seek it out.

Artmaking is, for many, an essential part of enacting these... See more

Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it's not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to rem... See more