Enter heuristics — The simple mental shortcuts that guide our choices through recognizable patterns. By enabling us to make better choices, faster, heuristics are a powerful ally in a creative professional’s toolkit.

Heuristics in the creative process

The term heuristic comes from the Ancient Greek word εὑρίσκω (heurískō) meaning ‘I find, discover’ and the concept was first introduced by cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon in the 1950s explaining a pattern of decision-making used when people have limited information and other constraints.

The creative process involves hundreds and sometimes thousands of quick decisions, we rely on heuristics to navigate those decisions.

They are critical tools in the creative professionals’ arsenal. Our education starts with many key heuristics such as:

• Designing for a target audience and not oneself

• Using negative space to create balance and contrast

• Using asymmetry to create tension and visual interest

• Using the Rule of Thirds to create dynamic compositions

On the path from novice to mastery, we pick up a multitude of heuristics along the way. We learn from mentors, clients, managers, and colleagues, but most of all from experience. Over time, the master has confirmed some conventional wisdom but has also developed many heuristics of her own.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were very close to buying a house. Everything was looking good and we got the green light from a building inspector, but we wanted to do some extra work on the place and decided to consult with an engineer. When I sent the inspection report with photos to the engineer, he immediately told me it wasn’t worth our time and money. He quickly pointed out that some of the water damage in the basement is a telltale sign of much greater structural damage.

Through his years of experience, he’s developed reliable heuristics that help him scope his effort and his clients’ priorities. He could’ve been wrong, but we weren’t going to (literally) bet the house on it.

The heuristic-driven approach

In the world of User Experience Design, Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics still holds as a starting point for building quality experiences on the web and software apps.

Ernest Hemingway had many heuristics and a favorite of mine is never empty the well in writing.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

— Ernest Hemingway

Hell, even drug dealers have a well-known heuristic — Don’t get high off your own supply.

In his book Anti-Fragile, Nassim Taleb goes in-depth about the false sense of security we get from data-driven decisions in complex environments and prefers to use heuristics. Ironically, Taleb’s background is as a quantitative analyst, and throughout his career, he observed the shortcomings of these complicated financial models and forecasts.

Essentially, in environments like the global economy and nature, we have too many unknowns and random events that are in play outside of the prediction model for us to draw any real conclusions.

Let’s take the example of a turkey at a farm (from Taleb’s book). For nearly a thousand days a turkey is fed by the farmer. Over that time frame, it comes to believe the farmer is its friend and provider, but then Thanksgiving season rolls around, and well… you know the rest of that story.

The turkey’s blindspot illustrates the shortcoming of these data-based prediction models. In this case, the farmer only kills the turkey one time and that’s the end. There is no model for predicting a one-time event that hasn’t happened yet.

While gathering data is important and helps us understand the overall landscape of things, we can’t become overly dependent because they offer incomplete models of reality.

This is why heuristics are critical tools for us. While they are also imperfect, they’re always accessible and can be quickly applied.

In the book Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda goes into depth about his experience working at Apple and building some of their central products like the Safari web browser and the iPhone. The book title itself is a play on the natural selection process in the theory of evolution. At Apple the design decisions go through this creative selection where teams are creating tons and tons of prototypes and over time, the best ones are selected and the prototypes that don’t hold up are discarded.

Through the process of creative selection, the team as a whole is developing their taste, but Apple also hires the best talent in their field, so the taste is already at a high benchmark. The product we as customers get to experience is the best product.

At Apple, designers created heuristics to set standards for the user experience such as the duration of an animation. Design heuristics were a counterpart to algorithms developed by engineers.

Kocienda contrasts the approach of design decisions at Apple with the way Google was making decisions at that time. At some point, Google was deciding on the best shade of blue for their buttons. They ran user tests on over 40 shades of blue to determine the best one. To Kocienda, this seemed absolutely ridiculous and a huge waste of resources.

What could these resource-intensive tests determine about the best shade of blue provide that a master graphic designer (equipped with an arsenal of heuristics) can’t? I’d take the master’s taste over the test results 10/10 times. There’s a place for data-informed decisions and this isn’t one of them.

However, heuristics are far from perfect

Heuristics have an obvious downside. Remember, they are decision-making shortcuts, the same kind that form our negative biases. We operate with as many negative and destructive heuristics as we do with positive ones.

The availability heuristic refers to our tendency to judge the likelihood of events based on the examples that quickly come to mind.

Heuristics can be informed by biases such as the Anchoring bias, when we rely too heavily on the first piece of information we get to make a decision.

Or Confirmation bias, our tendency to confirm existing beliefs and disregard information that contradicts them.

Each of these scenarios represents common decision-making shortcuts we take which often lead to erroneous decisions.

Heuristics are context-specific and not always applicable. They serve us best as loosely held tools, not as truths or undeniable rules.

Originally published on Boundless Canvas on April 3, 2023.

While there’s truth to this, I believe an intimate connection with an audience still remains a critical source of direction and inspiration.

There’s a distinction between art and most creative work that involves fulfilling functional needs. Our ideas may come from elsewhere, but our ability to create meaningful and viable work requires a deep connection with customers.

Since grade school English classes, we’ve been told that all writing should be directed toward a specific audience. So, to a degree, this is nothing new.

That question expands into our relevant craft: Who is going to use this product, work in this office, watch this film, or read this novel?

The UX process

In the field of user experience design, most of our work is understanding customer needs and their behavior. These practices are applicable across most creative fields.

I’ve observed many similar practices incorporated by others like comedians, musicians, and filmmakers.

As UX designers:

We conduct interviews with users and customers to understand their challenges, desires, and overall perceptions.

We review data on how people are using our products. Where are they most engaged? Where do we see unexpected drop-offs?

We do split testing by exposing different customer groups to different versions of a screen and observing which is more effective at producing the desired customer behavior.

We test prototypes. Prototypes are created and we learn what works about them by observing customers using them.

We observe people in their natural environments to identify their specific needs and expectations.

For a more nuanced understanding, we might conduct a diary study where people are asked to use our products and take daily notes on their experiences.

Most of these activities are then followed by some form of synthesis where we make sense of the information and decide on a direction.

The process of creating great products and services involves knowing which tactics to employ for the appropriate situations.

Findings might be mapped to customer archetypes and personas — Artifacts we build of different customer groups which include basic information about wants and needs, their relevant knowledge and understanding, and some basic demographic data.

Most of our work is on malleable software, which lends itself to constant iterations and affords the ability to constantly learn from customers and evolve the end product.

Going beyond process

But it’s also important to understand truly innovative solutions don’t come directly from customer input. They come from understanding and solving the specific problems we observe.

As Henry Ford famously declared, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Apple wouldn’t have invented the iPhone out of customer requests or recommendations. For this reason, how we frame our research matters just as much as the research itself. And we employ many techniques to articulate the problem.

These processes alone will not result in great creative output. The processes themselves don’t create a connection, there’s something else more critical at play here.

The neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, discovered that rational decision-making relies on emotional inputs.

Through studying subjects with damage to their emotional brain function, Damasio noticed that people were able to articulate their thought processes through decisions with great clarity. They seemed to be lucid thinkers and were even able to discuss highly traumatic experiences with no emotional charge.

You would guess with that type of clarity these people would be high-functioning, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they couldn’t hold menial jobs and were barely scraping by. While they had the ability to clearly articulate thoughts, they couldn’t make decisions. They would fumble back and forth on decisions and never commit.

It’s a huge finding that demonstrates our emotional connection is key to decision-making. Bringing this back to our customers, we might be able to rationalize what’s best for them based on research results, but if we’re not experiencing the pain they feel or the rewards they gain, we can only hope to get lucky in our decisions.

I find that there is a tendency to focus attention on future experiences through prototype testing while skipping the understanding of current state experiences. When we do that, we don’t build that emotional connection with where our customer or client is at.

The famed architect Louis Kahn learned this lesson the hard way. One of his best-known buildings the Richards Medical Research Laboratories was received in architectural circles with high regard for its innovative open structure. It showed architects and engineers new possibilities for designing spaces, but there was a big problem — the scientists that worked there hated it!

The labs were flooded with sunlight and the occupants taped aluminum foil to the windows to reflect the light and keep the labs from getting too hot. Scientists aren’t the most social group of people and they like their private reflective spaces that were eliminated in this building.

When Louis Kahn noticed the aluminum foil along all the windows, he knew he made a mistake. That led to his later works like the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, TX where instead of flooding the space with natural light, it enters through slits in the ceiling structure and is reflected towards the internal structure creating a beautiful glow. The spaces are bright and reflective while sheltering visitors from the blazing Texas sun.

Louis Kahn’s internalization of the scientists’ pain led to arguably some of the best works of architecture in the 20th century.

The best creative professionals I’ve worked with tend to be acutely sensitive in that they pick up on the slightest emotional shifts around them. When that sensitivity is channeled toward their audience, amazing work often follows.

Originally published on Boundless Canvas on March 2, 2023.

Direct feedback cycles

In Malcolm Gladwell’s acclaimed book Outliers, he illustrates that many top performers accrued 10,000 hours of practice while receiving tons of feedback.

While the 10,000-hour rule — the idea that top performers put in 10,000 hours of practice to become great — is a gross simplification, there are important lessons to pull from it.

Youth league hockey players born closer to January 1 are more likely to make the team. Why? Because they’re older and have a physical advantage over their peers. They get to benefit from a progressive spiral of quality coaching early on and have increased odds of playing professionally.

From 1960 to 1964, The Beatles did over 1,200 shows in Hamburg, Germany. These shows were 8+ hour day-long sets. They were forced to work through tons of material and eventually crafted their own sound through these shows.

There’s a huge difference between getting those hours in the confines of a garage vs. performing in front of a live audience day after day.

Both examples point to the importance of feedback loops.

Most of us get feedback from peers, managers, clients, or even an audience. This feedback is critical to growth, but we don’t always see it that way because something is always at stake: our jobs, ideas, and most of all — our egos.

Getting past our egos and embracing a growth mindset is the first step to receiving quality feedback. But there’s a lot more we can do to make the most out of it.

• Prepare questions

• Prepare for the moment

• Be curious instead of defensive

• Schedule more opportunities for feedback

Early in our careers, we make many intuitive choices but lack the ability to effectively communicate them. This shows up when our work is questioned and we fumble to explain why did things a certain way. Instead of wallowing in frustration, understand that it’s part of the process of creative development.

Preparing for these moments can be challenging for many reasons. Start with knowing your audience and what’s expected of you at the moment. If you have a chance to ask questions, spend some time working through the context they need and how you can provide it with the minimum amount of explanation.

Then prepare those questions. Tim Ferriss is amongst the best out there in crafting questions. I would argue he owes his whole career to that one skill. Here’s a short video on his tips to ask better questions.

Experiments

Experiments are perhaps the most important feedback loop. They help us understand reality. Through experimenting, we discover what works and perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t work.

There are countless examples of one-hit wonders. While the reasons vary, I would argue not knowing why they succeeded in the first place is a vital part of the equation.

It’s easy to focus all of our attention on creating output, after all, it takes a lot of time, effort, and care to produce the work and there never seems to be enough time.

But experiments are critical to being successful and they can also be a lot of fun!

Experiments must be designed and while they don’t always need to follow the rigor of a scientific study, we want to isolate and reduce as many variables as possible.

Let’s say you’re trying to create a specific glaze color for pottery, you’ll need to go through plenty of experiments to come within proximity of that goal. Different glaze combinations will need to be applied to numerous pots. The combinations will need to be documented and any variation in temperature and other conditions will need to be accounted for.

It helps to start experiments on the most fundamental assumptions of your work. What does all of your success depend on?

In the tech world, experiments are a regular activity. Most features and products go through some form of testing whether it’s having potential users work through prototypes or an A/B test where two versions of a screen are presented to different segments of customers.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Reis presented a concept of testing our most fundamental assumptions by shipping an MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. Today, the term is notoriously thrown around to mean anything and everything in tech companies, but it’s essentially a feature/product release stripped down to the essentials to determine whether or not customers really want It.

Reis learned that most startups were creating these elaborate plans and frequently shipping feature releases at a rapid pace without ever understanding if people actually wanted them. As you might imagine, the process led to many failed companies despite the brilliant minds building the products.

The Lean Startup became a movement that emphasized building learning feedback loops into the release cycles which allowed companies to react to what their customers were telling them and change direction if needed.

Performing artists, especially comedians, are also very experimental in their approach to creation. They use the stage and their audience to try different material before recording a comedy special.

In Amy Schumer’s recent docuseries Expecting Amy, we get to see her process of building the material for a Netflix stand-up special.

To create her material for the special, her team schedules numerous gigs across the country and she’s on a tight schedule to get through all of them. Her early shows prove to yield about 10–15 minutes of quality material. Her goal is to put together an hour’s worth.

Successful jokes are repeated at every stop and she tests some variations to see what gets the most laughs. She rewatches her shows as well to better understand what’s working. New jokes are crafted and tested regularly. Over that span of time, a lot of material is discarded and you see her tracking and accruing minutes of material until she finally has enough of it.

It’s a rigorous process, in the docuseries, Schumer is pregnant and also going through the challenges of a very difficult pregnancy while staying on schedule and endlessly working out her jokes.

In Skip the Line, James Altucher dedicates a whole chapter to experiments and he gives two examples of some wild experiments he does as an amateur comedian.

One experiment was performing a comedy act on the New York City Subway. Talk about dealing with a tough crowd!

Another experiment involved doing his act as a follow-up to the famed comedian Tracy Morgan at a comedy club. Most amateurs dread this experience. The crowd was already delighted with an unexpected celebrity and the best act they would see that night. They’re no longer paying attention.

Altucher took each of these moments as an opportunity for experiments.

Performing in front of a non-responsive crowd is tough, but every comedian deals with it. He chose to exaggerate that experience in both of these scenarios.

By doing so, he learned about himself as a performer and the effectiveness of his material. How did the situations impact his delivery? Did certain jokes land well despite all these challenges? How effective is he at thinking on his feet in more stressful environments?

Out of all of these feedback loops, experiments give us the most valuable information on what to focus on and what to abandon. The Lean Startup introduces the build, measure, and learn feedback loop and experiments are an integral part of that cycle.

Originally published on Boundless Canvas on January 26, 2023.

“If you don’t know what port your sailing towards, no wind is favorable. “

― Seneca

The journey of creating great work is not easy, a North Star helps to endure the inevitable challenges and obstacles.

But people don’t stumble upon their North Star, they shape it.

This lesson is captured well by Angela Duckworth in her seminal book Grit. She gives an example of Seattle Seahawks Head Coach, Pete Caroll, and his guiding life philosophy.

Coach Carroll’s life philosophy was created after a dramatic moment in his life. He was fired as head coach of the New England Patriots. After some reflection, he saw his results as a failure in effective decision-making. He needed a philosophy that would drive all decisions and actions if he were to ever be a head coach again.

The next few months were spent pouring through books and notebooks and filling binders with notes. Eventually, he wrote, “Do things better than they have been done before.”

A simple philosophy that serves a guiding mechanism greater than any one game, championship, offensive scheme, etc.

In Duckworth’s structure, there is a top-level goal, many mid-level goals, and a whole lot of low-level goals that form a pyramid. Ideally, we want alignment from our low-level goals to the top-level goal.

I have a low-level goal to attend a daily stand-up meeting at 11 am. Why? To understand what people are working on and where we have dependencies. Why? So we deliver quality on-time experiences. Why? To build a quality product. So on and so on, until it connects with the top-level goal.

A North Star should align craft and contribution

An effective North Star allows you to align what you do with the difference you’re making in the world.

When Jackie Robinson was chosen as the first black professional baseball player, not only did he need to be great at baseball, but he shouldered the burden of breaking down barriers for all of his people.

Robinson was not passive about racism. He regularly got in fights standing his ground.

He was kicked out of the army for refusing to go the back of the bus on base. Which at the time was a violation of federal law. When he’s chosen to join the baseball league, he’s told he needs to be strong, brave, and disciplined enough to not fight back.

It required immense strength to take the physical abuse and antagonism he faced in those early years and not give in. His abusers had a sole purpose: to make him look like he doesn’t belong and has no control over himself. Show the world that he doesn’t deserve to be there.

He endured the hardship without giving in. He’s not only remembered for breaking the racial barrier, which he did throughout his career, but also a great baseball player. He was driven by a greater purpose, but also played with a deep reverence for the game he loved.

The writer Ryan Holiday expressed on a recent podcast that sometimes writing seems like such a frivolous thing to do. Rearranging words on paper can seem like such a silly thing. But he’s driven by a reverence of the craft. Tuning into the craft of writing keeps him going.

I find myself often caught up in the frivolity and silliness of design work. So often, I’m re-arranging elements on a screen and nudging pixels in one direction or the other. But sometimes I connect with the bigger picture. Everything around me, my MacBook, coffee mug, furniture, all of it, was designed and I’m adding my little piece to that world.

I work as a UX designer now, but years ago I was an architectural designer.

When I got my first job in UX, I underestimated the work. I was arrogant thinking because I went through enduring and challenging training in architecture, that UX would somehow be a cakewalk. I got knocked on my ass many times due to that arrogance.

Only in recent years did I start approaching my work with reverence and humility which has not only helped me as a designer but made the work more enjoyable.

When we look at the greats or highly successful people, it’s easy to look at them as blessed and gifted. We often believe that they possess a drive or talent that the rest of us just don’t have.

By doing this, we let ourselves off the hook and our greatness remains dormant within.

Imagine if Jackie Robinson decided he had enough of the abuse from the people who wanted to see him fail. What if he decided being a damn good baseball player was enough and gave in to all the instigation?

A north star can pull you past the obstacles ahead.

Align your goals with the North Star

So how do you align everything under a North Star?

Some people have top-level goals like becoming a doctor one day or playing in the NFL, but no low-level or mid-level goals to get them there. Others have many mid-level goals getting a promotion or running a marathon, but no top-level connection to their achievements.

Warren Buffet once asked his pilot if he had greater dreams than flying him around everywhere. The pilot admitted he did.

Buffet gave the pilot a simple set of instructions to achieve those dreams.

1. List 25 of your career goals.

2. Circle only the top 5 goals.

3. Avoid the other 20 at all costs and don’t let them be the reason you don’t achieve the ones you circled!

Angela Duckworth adds another step to this:

4. Ask yourself, to what extent do these top 5 goals serve a common purpose?

To better illustrate this, let’s look at another example from Duckworth’s book, Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor for the New Yorker.

His path to being a cartoonist was paved with obstacles. Cartoonists deal with a high rejection rate with every round of submissions. Mankoff shares that the New Yorker receives about 500 submissions from contract cartoonists per issue for only 17 available spots. That means 96% of these submissions are rejected and the contract cartoonists represent only a fraction of the total submissions they receive per issue.

How does someone persist as a cartoonist for any stretch of time?

When Mankoff began as a cartoonist he shares that he proudly set off with 27 cartoons and went in person to different magazines only to get rejected by all of them. Many encouraged him to try again with more cartoons. How can someone make more than 27 cartoons in a week?

Soon after this experience, he stepped away and found himself doing a lot of reflecting on what to do with his career. Eventually, he arrived at a simple conclusion — he’s the funniest guy you’ve ever met!

That led to two mid-level goals, he’s either going to be a stand-up comic or a cartoonist. He spent all his time writing comedy routines and drawing cartoons. Over time, cartooning stood out and stand-up faded away.

He went all in on being a cartoonist. For two years he was regularly rejected by the New Yorker but had some small victories with other magazines. He then set his sight on being the best cartoonist in the world. That means he had to get published in the New Yorker!

He spent a lot of time in the library studying every cartoon in the New Yorker from 1925 onwards. After 2,000 rejections from the New Yorker from 1974 to 1977, his first cartoon was accepted. Then thirteen were accepted the next year. Twenty-five the following year, and so on.

In Bob’s story, we see the flexibility required around mid-level and low-level goals.

Now that we have a framework for aligning our goals, how can we increase our odds of achieving those goals?

Lean into action through better visualization

NYU social psychologist Dr. Emily Balcetis might have the answer to that.

Dr. Balcetis set out to understand how we can achieve a greater payoff with less effort in our current models of goal setting. Her own system typically involved putting post-its everywhere, makings lists, and creating all sorts of reminders — she wondered if we can somehow make this easier.

Her early research led to studying athletes. She and her team were at the Armory Building in Brooklyn where some of the best runners in the world trained. She began with the hypothesis that high-performing runners must have a broad vision and heightened awareness of their surroundings.

It turned out, the best runners focus their vision on super-specific milestones like a signpost or the shorts of a runner ahead of them.

When I use to train with the New York Road Runners, I was coached to do something similar. One day, as I was nearing the end of a run and close to giving up, a coach noticed and said, “Don’t slow down and keep up your pace until you get to that tree.”

As soon as I crossed the tree I was ready to slow down and he encouraged me to keep going and pointed to the next milestone. I got through the rest of the run that way and was pretty amazed that I had it in me to keep going like that.

Dr. Balcetis and her team followed up this insight with many studies and concluded that this spot-light vision technique worked for a variety of runners and not just the high-performing athletes she started with.

Her research also uncovered that things looked further away and hills looked steeper to people with chronic fatigue. The kitchen sink across the room literally looked further away than its actual distance. Similarly, people with high energy perceived the world as much easier to traverse.

She then uncovered that by visualizing objects as being nearer or hills as being more gradual, people experienced more ease in walking these distances. She concluded that by visualizing things as more achievable in our minds, they seem easier to us and we are more likely to lean in and do the work.

The way people visualize a problem strongly influences whether or not they will overcome it.

TL;DR

In summary, go beyond your limitations and create great work by doing the following:

1. Define your North Star

There are two ways to go about this.

One way is to start by defining your life philosophy / top-level goal. Have a reverence for your craft and think about how you want to contribute to other people.

The other way is to take the advice from Warren Buffet to his pilot and start by listing out all of your major goals. Circle the top 5. Look for alignment within these goals to define your North Star.

2. Align your mid-level and low-level goals with the North Star

Your North Star is a guide to where you’re going, but you need achievable goals along the way. Define some mid-level goals and low-level goals if you haven’t already. If you have, be vigilant about alignment with your North Star. If some of these goals don’t align, eliminate them and focus on what matters.

3. Use visualizations techniques to increase your likelihood of success

Observe and identify your existing perception of important tasks and goals. Replace the difficult visuals with easy ones. Do this whenever you’re resisting the work. You can finish a race faster than you believe by focusing your effort on short distances.

Originally published on Boundless Canvas on December 20, 2022.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When Bob Dylan arrived in NYC he spent long hours days on end in the New York Public Library. He was mostly reading accounts of life in the 1800s, more specifically, the Civil War.

Why? Because he wanted to know what life was like then and how this country got through an era where society was torn at the seams. What were people talking about? What were there day to day concerns? Most importantly, how did people talk and what was the language?

When living in Italy as a child, Kobe Bryant would spend hours daily pouring through NBA game tapes with his father. He looked for all the key subtleties, the footwork, and the various offensive and defensive styles of NBA teams. He intensely studied the stars from Magic Johnson to Larry Bird to Dominique Wilkins. “I used to watch their moves and then I would add them to my game.”

He would just as intensely watch films from his own performances and of his opponents. It’s not unusual for an aspiring athlete to watch videos of other great athletes or even of their own performances, but it’s exceptional for anyone, especially as a child, to be that diligent about it.

Legendary music producer, Rick Rubin describes Eminem as obsessive. He always has a notebook with him and he’s always filling them up with writing. Rubin quotes Eminem:

I write constantly, to the point where while I’m writing my books I know 95 percent of this stuff, 98 percent of it’s never gonna get used. But by writing all the time it’s like I’m sharpening my tools. And I’m more able to draw upon that skill-set when needed. And sometimes a reference that I wrote two years ago might come back and find it’s way into a record completely unrelated just because I was doing this homework and coming up with a new rhyme scheme or just hearing a word I liked and thinking about how that could rhyme.

The examples above are habits of some of the best. Mythical figures of our time and the obsessive dedication that drove their craft. You don’t have to be the next Eminem or Kobe Bryant, or even care to be like them.

But identifying and honing your own obsessions can pay dividends.

Founder and former executive editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly popularized the idea that “a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor” can make a good living by building only a small audience of 1,000 true fans. Kelly describes a true fan as a die-hard fan that will essentially pay $100 a year for products, art, or services that you create, resulting in $100,000 for the year. The essay was originally written in 2008 and rings true louder today than it did back then.

However, the path to 1,000 true fans doesn’t happen overnight. Jack Butcher, a designer who has grown notoriety through his unique designs, illustrates it perfectly in the tweet below. The path involves going for a long time with little or no results for a long time.

https://twitter.com/visualizevalue/status/1512776403426725893?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1512776403426725893%7Ctwgr%5E11250a445e91b7715eeef61473cdc327faf7b675%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fvisualizevalue%2Fstatus%2F1512776403426725893image%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fi.embed.ly%2F1%2Fimage3Furl3Dhttps253A252F252Fabs.twimg.com252Ferrors252Flogo46x38.png26key3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07

Today we have people like Mr. Beast who has one of the most popular YouTube channels at the age of 24 with 115 million subscribers. His recreation video of the sensational show Squid Games generated more revenue than the original! He didn’t just accidentally stumble upon his success. He got there by obsessing over every element of content creation on YouTube. He met daily with a small group of friends that would share every day about what they were learning about successful videos on YouTube. He obsessed over every detail from the thumbnail image to the sequencing of events to crafting titles, leaving no stone unturned. Everyone in the group went on to grow channels with over a million subscribers and Mr. Beast became the juggernaut he is today.

David Senra hosts Founders Podcast, a show where he summarizes biographies of the greats. He found himself obsessed with reading biographies about people’s lives and one day decided to start sharing about it on his own podcast. For years he was doing a solo podcast talking about the biographies he was reading. He spends 20+ hours of reading and note-taking for about an hour-long episode. He’s now turned an obsession into a viable business.

How to follow suit

The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the new form of leverage. This was only invented in the last few hundred years. It started with the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding. Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.

— Almanac of Naval Ravikant

The simple lesson here is to find your own obsessions. Identify the things you are already doing naturally.

Whether it’s cooking, reading, hunting down the best deals in town, whatever it is, start there. Trung Phan, a business writer known for his viral Twitter threads, advises people to find something they would be willing to keep working at for 4 or 5 years before seeing any major results.

Common wisdom suggests asking yourself “What would I do if I couldn’t fail?”

But the better question is “What’s something I would be doing even if I knew it would fail?”

That’s how you identify what’s worth pursuing yourself. Something you will persevere at regardless of the circumstances.

Maybe you don’t have a specific thing.

Start with your interests. Are you drawn to something super-specific like mid-century modern Italian furniture or light-roasted coffee beans from Hawaii?

It’s hard to determine how long your interests will last in a particular area, so don’t get caught up in picking the right one. Just find a starting point and go from there. An interest in mid-century modern Italian furniture can reveal a greater interest in furniture design or interior design. Maybe something else entirely.

After establishing a starting point, choose a medium. Will it be social media posts? Will share illustrations or launch an e-commerce shop? Will it be a personal blog?

I suggest starting with low stakes and a low barrier to entry. The important pieces are starting, getting feedback, and doing the work. The quality will come over time with dedication. Quality is not the starting point.

George Lucas, inspired by the comic series *Flash Gordon, *set out to write a space opera.

He locked himself in his office 8 hours a day and kept it at until he wrote the first draft of what came to be Star Wars. The process went through multiple drafts of receiving feedback and revisions.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield draws a clear distinction between the amateur and the professional.

The amateur protects and treasures each of their unique ideas while the professional brings no significance to their work. The professional shows up regularly and works. She’s not attached to good ideas and understands those good and bad ideas are produced in the same process of working.

Good ideas will come but commit to a routine. Write or sketch for an hour every morning before the work day or in the evening if you prefer it.

Seth Godin offers a powerful call to action in his book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. He distinguishes between creatives making art for the sake of art, like that screenplay sitting at the bottom of a drawer, and the creative professional that puts the effort towards building an audience.

Making a long-lasting career from your passions is possible. The path is simple, but not easy. Godin’s book makes the following points:

• There is no pre-determined path to success as an artist

• Art creates change and blasts new windows open. We need more of this.

• To make the best possible art you need a feedback loop: share your work, receive feedback, make improvements

• Join a cohort of others doing similar things

• Being a creative professional is a decision to show up and do the work

• If you treat your art as a hobby, it will never grow to be more than that

• Creative blocks are the result of perfectionism

James Altucher swears by a simple practice of writing 10 ideas every day in his book Skip the Line.

Writing ideas helped him get out of a slump after losing all his money from a failed business. He would go to a coffee shop every morning and write a list of ideas like 10 ideas for a chapter in a book he read, 10 alternate endings, etc. He found it lifted his spirits and eventually started generating ideas and emailing them off to people that might want them. He emailed Jim Cramer, host of the show Mad Money, a list of 10 articles Cramer should write. Cramer wrote back saying “You should write these!”

That was the start of Altucher’s writing career and he’s gone on to write 20 books since then.

In 2021, artist Mike Winkelmann famously known as Beeple sold an NFT through an auction at Christie’s for $69 million. The piece, Everydays: The First 5000 Days was a collage of 5,000 consecutive days of art work shared through Beeple’s Instagram.

Beeple created and shared this artwork daily for over a decade before earning a dime from it.

Building a creative practice is simply a matter of consistent creation and sharing your work.

Expect that it will take years for any worldly results. And that’s why obsession matters.

It’s hard to show up consistently for years with no results for something you don’t care about. You have to hone your passion just as you do your practice.

While nothing is guaranteed, the journey is simple. Trust yourself and trust the process.

Originally published on Boundless Canvas on December 10, 2022.

I know, it’s a big question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now and it led me down a very long and winding road.

TL;DR — Maybe.

If you’re going to stick with me for the whole story, it starts with desire.

Desire is learned not intrinsic

Desires are learned just as we learn language. In the recently published book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis, he brings forth the works of French Philosopher Rene Girard, who observed that primary characters in many of the classic novels rarely expressed spontaneous desires. This includes books by writers like Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Proust, and many others. They relied on other characters to show them what they wanted. Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire.

We think our desires are spontaneous as if we just want something, but our desires are always mediated by a model, either a person or a thing.

What about biological and evolutionary factors? Girard distinguishes things like food, sex, security, and shelter as hard-wired needs. Our desires aren’t intrinsic, we learn what to want just like we learn how to speak our first language — through imitation.

This is the paradox of mimetic desire — We secretly want what others want because they want it. And as a result, scarcity and rivalry exist amongst human relationships.

When I was in first grade, I was obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I took a road trip with my family to Houston following the school year. I brought some Ninja Turtles toys with me. My older cousin saw them and said, “Ninja Turtles are for babies!”

I bit back, “No they’re not!.”

At the end of the trip, as we’re packing up to go home, my dad asks me, “What happened to your Ninja Turtles?”

“Ninja Turtles are stupid” I proclaimed.

“What happened? You couldn’t stop talking about them the whole drive.”

What I failed to see, and my dad probably picked up on, is that mimesis happened. I learned about these bandana-wearing turtles from classmates in school. But what do first graders really know? I was imparted with the wisdom from a 3rd grader that Ninja Turtles are for babies. It was time to move on.

Mimetic desire leads to sameness and conformity. Think of all those non-declared majors your freshmen year in college that all wound up converging to the same handful of majors.

You’re at a bar and you’re going to order a beer and your friend orders a martini and you say “Oh I want a martini instead.”

You had no plans of ordering that martini, but were influenced by your friend to do so. No big deal, but what if your friend tells you they just got a promotion, you might start to think, why didn’t I get a promotion?

But on the other side of mimesis, the more similar we become the more different we try to be. This is how mimesis creates rivalry. If he buys a Tesla, you might reject electric cars all together and buy yourself a Ford Mustang instead.

Look at the biblical story of Kane and Abel, brothers who shared a desire for favor with God. This desire brought them to conflict, ending with Kane killing Abel.

Mimesis creates emergent patterns

Each of us is engaged in the dynamics of mimetic desire in some fashion. It’s why we have shared languages, cultures, and standard jobs. As a result, behavioral patterns and dynamics emerge among us. They are as diverse and varied as the species on this planet, but also shared and predictable.

In his 1954 poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg personifies a particular pattern as Moloch, the beast that dwindled the creative minds of his generation. Moloch is an ancient deity that demanded heinous ritualistic sacrifices. An extreme, but sadly common sacrifice was burning children for Moloch to grant victory in war.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

What exactly does Ginsberg’s Moloch have to do with mimesis? Let’s start with a brilliant essay written by Scott Alexander called Meditations on Moloch.

Scenarios

Alexander goes through a series of scenarios relating to different political and economic scenarios and highlights the inevitability of Moloch emerging in each case. The common interpretation of Ginsberg’s Moloch is that he’s referring to capitalism, but that doesn’t quite fit the bill. It’s certainly a part of it, but not the whole picture.

In all of Alexander’s scenarios, cooperating and coordinating across the system would create the ideal results and in each case, it’s seemingly impossible for people to do that.

Fish farming

In one scenario we have a thousand fish farmers sharing a lake and each farmer is pulling in $1,000/ month in profits until the waste and pollution add up. The farms are no longer producing enough fish and essentially all profits are eliminated. One farmer invests in a filtration system and all the farmers agree to do the same which brings their profit back up to $700/ month. $700/month is $1,000 from the fish minus $300 for the system.

Out of a thousand farmers, one decides he doesn’t need the filter system so stops using it and he’s back up to $999 ($1 cost for his pollution). Some others follow suit and a back-and-forth cycle continues. A cycle driven by mimesis. Wanting more. Wanting what others have.

Ginsberg’s Moloch rears its ugly head.

Other scenarios

The next notable example is a classic challenge of capitalism. You have a garment company where the owner sells at minimal profits. He wants to pay his workers more and give them better conditions. He raises the pay, but can’t raise the pricing in the cutthroat industry. Essentially, all his competitors would need to do the same to provide better conditions for the workforce.

Again, we see Moloch as a systemic emergence.

Alexander lays out 14 scenarios, I’ll mention one — the “race to the bottom.” It’s common practice for jurisdictions to lower taxes and reduce regulations to lure in businesses. Cities have a choice — stay competitive or lose out on jobs and revenue. In one-off cases, like the scenarios above, this would be fine, but in reality, everyone is forced to sacrifice common values to stay in the game.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Conclusion on Moloch

At first read, Ginsberg’s Moloch seemed distant from the ancient demon. In ancient times, people sacrificed their most sacred possessions to Moloch — their children, their future! This leads to some questions. How does a society start to believe that a deity would demand children to live? And in what world would people choose the death of their children instead of their own in battle?

Literally and metaphorically, people sacrificed their futures to survive another day. And that’s the Moloch Ginsberg sees in his time. Alexander points out the system and emergent nature of Moloch. A behavior perpetuated by negative mimesis cycles that play out over and over in human life.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with Web3. There are a few more points to get to, but we’re getting there.

Scapegoating

As mimetic behavior continues to worsen in a community such as cutthroat competition or a huge disparity between the rich and poor, a mimetic crisis emerges. Historically, societies have relied on ritual sacrifices to resolve the crisis. A scapegoat is chosen by the leader and all the bad juju dies with the scapegoat. Moloch embodies the worst of it. In fact, Girard believes that people started keeping pets for the purpose of sacrifice and not for the love and entertainment that we enjoy today.

I recommend watching a political debate through the lens of mimesis. What you observe is two sides blaming all of our problems on different scapegoats. The democrats blame the rich while the republicans blame government oversight. Each talking point will map to an iteration of these scapegoats.

Every week on the social media cycle a new sacrifice is demanded. Maybe a politician, a cop, a celebrity, a business leader, anyone. We demand these sacrifices and the crisis remains unresolved.

Currently, social media amplifies negative

Social media has done this wonderful thing of connecting the whole globe, but it’s also become the greatest mimesis engine in history. Instagram is like opening a portal to the life you wish you had where every one has picturesque lives, eating great food, beautiful children, beautiful homes, and everyone just always seems to be on vacation. Facebook and Twitter get flooded with status and virtue signaling patterns with people rejecting or showing allegiance to the latest trends.

But the worst thing we see today, is what social media algorithms decide to amplify. It likely wasn’t anyone’s intent to amplify hateful messages or lead to more misery on the planet. Most of these consequences would’ve been unforeseeable. To even imagine at the onset that these platforms would gain user bases upward of a billion people would’ve seemed delusional in those early days.

But here we are, in this world where billions of people have Facebook accounts and profiles on other social media platforms. Since 2016 we’ve seen different platforms experimenting with ways to solve some of this. As Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models get better, we might find more robust solutions. But until then, this is one of the big societal challenges introduced by these new technologies.

Ad based model of Web2

The rise of social media and other internet platforms faced a challenging paradox — the more users, the stronger the platform, but growing a high-volume user base requires the products to be free. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. all faced this exact challenge and prioritized making the platform free while figuring out revenue models.

They all settled on advertising as their main revenue model. People can freely browse these platforms as they like, but they will see advertising. It seemed innocuous enough, but to make better ads and also better user experiences, companies collect and mine user data.

Over time, they used this data to make their products more addicting and the advertising more appealing perpetuating negative mimetic behaviors by constantly pulling on our desires.

So here’s where Web3 comes in. Web3 alone won’t end mimetic cycles. This behavior pattern is baked into our biology for better and worse. But people building in the space can operate with more awareness. They can look at the second and third-order consequences of their choices and monitor the negative and positive dynamics that arise in their communities.

Key mimetic challenges in Web3

The PFP Craze

The first major mimetic challenge that comes to mind is the PFP craze that rocked the scene in 2021 and early 2022. There’s something powerful where communities come together and replace their profile photos with NFT artwork. It’s a great way to show support and belonging within a community.

However, it’s also a form of status signaling. Boasting a Cryptopunk or a BAYC isn’t simply saying you belong to the community, but also a statement of wealth. Status games are not innately a bad thing, but they can spiral into a mimetic crisis as people drive to differentiate themselves and chase scarcity throwing all caution to the wind.

Blockchain maxis

Another powerful mimetic force is the emergence of religious-like cults around specific blockchains. These individuals are referred to as maxis short for maximalists. It’s common to see Ethereum and Bitcoin maxis going at it with each other on Twitter and Reddit threads, but each blockchain out there comes with its own group of maxis.

I won't lie, it’s entertaining from the sidelines and even contributes to the value of these blockchains. There are surprisingly brilliant maxis on all sides out there. They’ve dug their heels in and don’t change their mind easily. So while they contribute some overall value to the space, they are also damaging.

Permanent history

The major blockchains are all transparent and keep an open public record of all transactions. This is the power of the blockchain and one of it’s primary mechanisms for creating trust, but there might be unforeseen consequences to some of the things recorded so publicly.

Imagine if you own NFTs from a specific artist and all of a sudden that artist becomes an enemy of the country where you live. The government could easily see that you have supported this artist and decide to take action. Or years later, cultural values change and evolve and all of a sudden some artwork you innocently bought is now very offensive and people are up in arms about it.

The flip side here is that one of the main appeals of artwork as NFTs is that there is a 24/7 public market open to the whole world to resell your collection. This is a similar catch-22 to the network effects web2 platforms faced.

Tokenomics

Web3 brings with it a new funding mechanism in the form of NFTs and fungible utility tokens. A common case we see today is a project that releases 10,000 variations of art in the form of an NFT to fund its project. People buy them either because they want to be a part of the community or as a speculative play expecting the NFT value to rise so they can sell.

The project founders receive a small percentage of the value on every resale. This rewards the early community and they can potentially cash in for their early support or hold on to the NFTs for further rewards and participation from the project.

Before the NFT craze, we saw a similar dynamic with blockchain projects where they sold blockchain tokens and coins to early investors that became known as an ICO or Initial Coin Offering to fund their work.

The challenge here is that a new dynamic of speculation is being introduced. Imagine if every app you download comes with tokens that can be resold. Maybe you downloaded a new messaging app to communicate with a friend and you receive this token with the download. If that token is the reason the app doesn’t have any advertising, that could be worth it, but who knows how this plays out.

Will you end up countering your friend to use a different messaging app instead, not because it’s better, but because the token has more value?

Not to mention the innumerable scams and nefarious actors flooding the space. It seems like a new big-time scam is exposed every other day. When you provide the ability for anyone with a computer to generate currency, it’s par for the course. I believe Web3 will overcome this, not saying scams will go to zero or anything like that, but new agreements, systems, and infrastructure will dramatically reduce them. It’s what happens with any industry.

Web3 can also damper Moloch

Fish farm scenario

If we look at the fish farming scenario, web3 has an interesting solution with smart contracts over a trusted permissionless network. The agreement can be enforced through code. All fish farmers agree to maintain a filter system and if someone backs out, they’ll be fined automatically. Of course, there are nuances that the code would need to pick up on like if a filter system is down for repair or something else of that nature.

Mitigate the need for ads

As I discussed in the tokenomics of Web3, there is potential to introducing new monetization models that can mitigate the need for advertisement as a primary business model. This relies on the value of token ownership by its users, creators, and stakeholders.

Data ownership back to individual

Products like Lens protocol allow you to take your data and whatever community and audience you’ve created on one platform with you to others. If the adoption and standardization of tools like this take off, we can see a world where companies are held to a higher standard in doing right by their communities or risk losing everyone.

This would also create many new opportunities for individuals to grow value because the most biggest community contributors can leave at anytime.

Ultimately, Web3 will rely on iterative experiments not a masterplan

Mimetic theory and Ginsberg’s Moloch are helpful to understand the dynamics introduced by new technologies. Technology itself isn’t neutral. It enables and enhances certain things and discriminates against other behaviors. But it’s also true that technology exists in a continuum and one iteration is not the final product. It continues to evolve. Web3 has a long way to go in it’s growth and evolution. The process will be experimental and new iterations and innovations will bring with it new possibilities. I don’t think some sort of masterplan on what to do and not do will be to effective as it rarely is at today’s pace of rapid innovation.

Alexander’s conclusion

Going back to Scott Alexander and his essay on Moloch, he ends up concluding that our best hope is the rise of a super-intelligence from our technological innovations. Alexander’s conclusion is based on a book called Superintelligence, written by Nick Bostrom.

Bostrom maps out a pathway for the convergence of individual AI systems to a greater system. These AIs would operate beyond national borders and, in a positive scenario, would serve the greatest need for people. Eventually, this would lead to a global singleton, a governance system that could be democracy or something else entirely, but one that unites the whole globe.

The super-intelligence could potentially limit our negative competitive behaviors and create environments that result in more cooperation. Of course, this future is generations away and not at all guaranteed, but an interesting scenario to consider.

You have to think that a protocol-based currency system that is beyond a single nation’s control or other owned by special interest groups would be a critical condition for a future beyond Moloch.

Originally published in The Voyage newsletter on November 17, 2022.

Will the NFT Art World Mirror the Contemporary Art World?

Contemporary art is intimidating. It’s driven by concept over aesthetics and the pricing doesn’t make any sense.

How is a steel sculpture of a rabbit worth $91 million? Or a steel and glass cabinet filled with painted pharmaceutical pills worth $19 million?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mariabruna/147511307/

Of course, you can ask an even more absurd question about NFTs, how is a jpeg that anyone can openly download worth $69 million?

In the past week or so I listened to two audiobooks on the topic of contemporary art: Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton and The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson.

Thornton’s book highlights the different actors in the contemporary art scene and Thompson’s book is all about the absurd pricing of contemporary art. It’s only over the past two decades that we have witnessed art by living artists selling at records that were previously held by dead artists.

The art world is complex. Thornton highlights 3 groups — the art world (academics and critics), the buyers and sellers (dealers, collectors, and auction houses), and the artists.

The contemporary art world has already set the stage for more individuals declaring themselves as artists than ever before. Web3 and the introduction of NFTs will exponentially increase that, if it hasn’t already in just a few years.

What I found most fascinating in Thornton’s account is the dynamics between and within each of these groups. For collectors owning a work of art is a status symbol. Buying is often driven by ego and prestige. Auction houses know this and play to the ego of buyers.

Collectors often don’t even look at work before buying. They rely on their dealers to make the decision. Dealers will list off attributes and the description of work to the collector. They buy accordingly.

Artists often, but certainly not always, see capital and money as a corruption of art. They understand art prices are somewhat whimsical and don’t speak directly to quality. But of course they want to eat and make a living.

Then you have artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst who know the value of branding and marketing. Jeff Koons was trading commodities in the 1980s and openly talks about his work using terms like market share to the horror of the art world.

If you’re interested in exploring the art scene in more detail, I strongly urge you to give these books a read or listen.

I wonder how this plays out in Web3.

NFTs give artists a direct relationship with their collectors. The closest thing to a middleman in Web3 is the marketplace. There are a few, like Foundation and SuperRare, that offer a selective process to maintain quality and exclusivity, but most others offer an easy on ramp for any artist to mint and sell their work.

NFT or non-fungible tokens are intrinsically linked to financial value through exchanges and transactions on the blockchain. And artists now collect a royalty everytime their work is resold.

No doubt the Web3 art scene is young and ripe. Mostly, the high rolling collectors are people that made their money buying and trading cryptocurrencies and are now buying and trading NFTs.

So how will this space evolve? Will we have a rising community of tastemakers? Such as art dealers, critics, and academics that catapult the value of certain artists and artwork. Will art that capitalizes on shock value and creative concepts dominate the upper echelon of the market or will it be something entirely different?

Traditional Art is Making its Way Onto Web3

Back in late February, I witnessed a Twitterspace with a brilliant realist painter, Jeremy Lipking auctioning off his first NFTs.

Lipking minted 25 editions of his oil painting Adrift, a photo-realistic painting of his daughter that echoes the delicate beauty of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia.

The piece was auctioned off live to the top 25 bidders on the Objkt marketplace.

This is not the first traditional artist making their way into NFTs and certainly won’t be the last. I expect a lot of this to happen this year.

Earlier in February, Kevin Rose hosted Adam Lindemann, a famed art collector, on his podcast Proof about his foray into the NFT world.

Lindemann discussed his entrance into the art scene in the 1980s. He casually mentions his time hanging out with Andy Warhol and meeting Basquiat. Clearly, he’s no small time collector.

In the podcast, he shares his thoughts on some of the largest grossing NFT projects including Cryptopunks, BAYC, and Chromie Squiggles.

I’m also observing other on ramps to Web3 for traditional artist and collectors such as physical (IRL) exhibitions of NFT art.

SuperRare, the most exclusive NFT marketplace, is holding physical exhibitions of their NFTs and many others are popping up everyday.

These occasions are not only expanding exposure, but normalizing the Web3 and NFTs.

Is There a Dark Side to Open and Freely Composable Art?

In last week’s newsletter I discussed the concept of composability in Web3.

Composability is why I’m excited about Web3. However, I recently saw a Tweet that illustrates how this quality of Web3 is not always a good thing.

CC0, in the Tweet specifically refers to the open Creative Commons license which essentially means “no rights reserved.” I started exploring NFTs within that timeframe.

If you’ve been in NFT marketplaces during this time, you will notice the feeds are flooded with derivative pfp projects.

However, as pointed out by Cozomo de’Medici in his reply to the Tweet, there have been some interesting projects due to CC0, specifically, XCOPY’s Right-Click and Save As Guy. If you scroll down to Minute 4 on this Cozomo Medici newsletter issue, you’ll see some great derivatives of the piece.

But either way, while composability may increase the amount of noise in the space, it also creates new types of collaborations and goes on to improve the value of the original work.

Quality derivatives of Right-Click Save As Guy, increase the value of the original work. Respected artists can pay homage to an artist they admire.