Making Art For Me or For You

June 29, 2024

/ Coming up on 6 months done of 2024. Whether you are or aren’t looking forward to US election season, continued large-cap tech growth, or potential global volatility (war, weather), it might be coming anyway! TBD. For now, we can be part-time amateur philosophers.

/ Data points on creativity…

Definition:

data points = any piece of information with underlying belief that all information is informative but the level of how helpful it is to you depends on your current lens, focus, time horizon

Data Points:

  • A clip circulated on X (here) on how Rick Rubin tells Kanye West “If it sounds like something could be on someone else’s album it can’t be on your record.”

  • Thinking about this more…What is the relationship between a) content being a passion project/media/sharing/learning in public and b) aiming to provide value and content? Is the purpose of reflecting singular passion/not caring about others’ views or to appeal to and generate engagement? Two data points come to mind here.

    • One is this idea that movies that appeal too intentionally to their audience can flop at the box office as they don’t reflect genuine, authentic content. I faintly remember there was an animated movie that had a poor box office debut because of this, perhaps Cars 2 or The Emoji Movie.

    • The second idea is a brief mention from a podcast in which Tim Ferriss (entrepreneur/investor/podcast guy) talked about balancing his motivations with what is best for business growth (image below).

  • I do like this clip from Peter Thiel here (of all the things people like and don’t like about him, someone who is thoughtful, collects a lot of data, and has tried a lot of stuff is generally someone who ends up saying things of which are interesting)

    • Summary: Think about the future. Education isn’t a substitute for the future. Think concretely about what you want to do. Don’t do what is hyper-competitive. Where are the frontiers, pockets of innovation, to do new things?

Other Random Stuff

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs – nice to visit every once in a while to get a feel on what people are building (interesting or not, relevant or not, etc.)

Wrote These Recently

Fun Tweets / Memes

This photo circulated on LinkedIn, and people were impressed with the “field research” an analyst at Wells did on CMG, given recent press attention on Chipotle portion sizes being smaller. I like this because as long as you get a decent sample size, going out and collecting your own data can have a real edge. In an increasingly quantitative world I feel this alpha may persist.

Until next time -VS

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