nicolas cevallos

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it,... See more

Substack sells intellectual taste as cultural currency and contemporary belonging.

Think of it this way. We all agree that a cool person with panache can wear a garment we’d previously dismissed and show it to us in a new, positive light — freaking & redeeming a previously benighted garment. Ipso facto we must also concede that a person whose style, energy and gestalt we find repellent can wear a garment we’d previously appre... See more

Cuteifying something was a way of making oneself its protector, rendering it powerless in a nonadversarial manner. One famous example took place in 1988, when high-school girls reportedly remarked that the dying Hirohito was kawaii, making a nonissue of his responsibility for the war. Hello Kitty, the white cat with a pink bow on her ear, is the ul... See more

No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.

What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts.

Too often, every single day, we attempt to map already finalized products to a mismatched ... See more

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

This got me thinking that, ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one's own unique perspective. It doesn't matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneous... See more

Gen Alpha is growing up in this space from a much younger age. Their online selves are, to them, even more directly tied to their physical selves than they were for us growing up. What happens when they think growing and experimenting in a certain direction isn’t right for them because their TikTok algorithm keeps pushing them another way? Their fr... See more