Emergent properties tend to have deep truths. They bubble up organically, like they were just waiting to be discovered all along. The best way to cultivate their growth is to learn how not to suppress them, how to get out of your own way.
Read MoreINVISIBLE WORLD
The difference between everything that’s come before and the last two seconds (relatively speaking) is that media now shows us things that were otherwise invisible, as opposed to made up. We now seamlessly blend our intake of special effects—impossible events, like superheroes flying over skyscrapers—with otherwise unseeable events—things like slo-mo, high speed, and highly dynamic color correction. We practically expect it, demand it. We count on augmented experiences that transcend our unassisted human abilities, and we feel like there’s something unsatisfying if our media experiences don’t show us physics-defying phenomenon.
Read MorePLAYING BY HEART
It's not the kind of music that matters in this case. It's all about how it's played.
Read MoreLUST
There’s a reason so much art has to do with love and sex and desire in its many forms. Lust empowers us to short circuit intellect so we can access other forces.
Read MoreOF COURSE I'M LYING!
I lie to tell the truth. My actions may contrive, but my intention is to speak clearly and honestly through those actions. Creative work never lies; it’s always authentic to itself. That it might invent tales to reveal deep truths about reality is beside the point. You may tell falsehoods in a story, but if the story successfully misleads an audience, the story itself…it’s true.
Read MoreREVERSION TO THE MEAN
We all revert to the mean when we do the things that we know work. It’s a self perpetuating trend, proving the phenomenon every time we achieve so-so results. Actions that deliver middling results tend to be things we repeat, no matter how hard we try to tip the balance toward brilliance. We tend to do things today that worked out yesterday.
Read MoreIT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
Find a crack in the road: fix it. Cause a foolish fender bender: learn from it. Develop a better highway ramp: build it. In the churning, maddening mass of growling engines, I sometimes cling to the thought that genuine progress might be afoot.
Read MoreEVIDENCE OF HUMANITY
The lights in the darkness are evidence that people have accumulated themselves and their energies. Behind these lights are stories and sorrows, triumphs and traumas, pleasures and, above all, perseverance. In the bright patches of light shining from a darkened globe there are concentrations of humanity, and come what may, they represent forces beyond any singular individual anywhere.
Read MoreFEVER DREAMS
Ideas often come when I least expect it. When they burst into mind unannounced or unescorted by linear thought, they’re often my clearest creative lights, regardless of the subject. The obvious dilemma is figuring out how to keep a grip on what I was doing a moment before without losing the details of the new thought that’s just appeared.
Read MoreDOUBLE RAINBOW
Sometimes there are moments of beauty or epiphany or surprise that simply need to exist in the moments you experience them. You have to make peace with the thought that there simply won’t be a “later”. There won’t be a “future”. There won’t be a “payoff”. There is the experience, right now, and you just so happen to be lucky enough to experience it.
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