Sterling Proffer

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more

If you can sell a book, which is the most oversaturated and underpriced product in the world, you can sell anything.”

If you were to study some of the most admired creative thinkers, writers, and artists to have ever lived, you would find that all shared a passion for their work, an intense desire to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet, when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize... See more

The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using the it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them.

An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited

Creators and communities do what they do because they love their world, and they want to invite more people into it. It’s about delivering non-replicable value to passionate audiences. As you scale, you will reach a point where it’s impossible — indeed, damaging — to devote more hours of the day to creative endeavors.