Handicrafts and Sesshu I have almost never judged a work of art by first looking at its signature. This way of assessment holds no interest for me. If what I see is good, it is good with or without a seal. Whether it is a painting or a pot, you must first look at the thing itself. Yanagi Sōetsu, The Beauty of Everyday Things fameseeing
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. Paul Graham, How to do what you love fame
Spelled with a lowercase letter I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such. Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn fame
Somebody is living on this beach Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then I was lonely. To the castle, a sign must have said. Somebody is living on this beach. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress famelonelinesssolitude
1,000 True Fans An Essay by Kevin Kelly kk.org To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. artmakingfame
Cities and Ambition An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Boston says you should be smarterFlorence and MilanA city speaks to you mostly by accidentCity messages citiesambition
Boston says you should be smarter Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer. What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to. intelligenceboston
Florence and Milan You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him? genius
A city speaks to you mostly by accident A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off. communication
City messages So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly queasy. I'd always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize now that was because I'd always implicitly understood it to mean ambition in the areas I cared about. When you list everything ambitious people are ambitious about, it's not so pretty. Everybody worships