sari

The social returns to prescient taste and committed fandom just went up dramatically. This dynamic will upend how cultural trends are born, financed, grow and die, change marketing and community building, and turbocharge the value of influence. It will also create a backlash to the financialization of every aspect of creativity, and leave us to gra... See more

And I think that’s one of our enduring understandings of what ambition has to be something massive, something that rules your life and every decision you make, something that never stops burning, and crucially, something that somehow lands people in this mystical land of perfect contentment. If you’ve ever known someone whose primary attribute is a

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I’m betting on people. I’m betting that people will refuse to abandon their souls to the machine, and refuse to forget who they truly are. People just need, in Plato’s words, anamimneskein —”to be reminded.” And that’s a process that is best done in genuine encounters.

Here is nearly every story you see or hear in a nutshell: A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter

hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as

much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first

blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last

blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

One example is how Amazon.com provides free gift wrapping in order to help track which books are purchased as gifts. At one point Amazon was not tracking the number of items sold as gifts; the company added the gift-wrapping feature to be able to track it. Another example is how consumers are given coupons so retailers can see, among other things,

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