🏴 On creativity, intelligence, and overnight success. Ten Bullets.

To the obsessed,

Here are your weekly Ten Bullets.

Ten ideas to help you build companies, make art, and fuel your obsession.

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1. On attraction:

2. On empty calendars:

3. On Bobby Fischer’s aura:

"There's a lot of talk in Reykjavik about ‘the Fischer aura,’ a mysterious field of psychological force that swirls around Fischer like a private hurricane, disorienting opponents who fall within its influence. It sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but grandmasters who have played him say there is something to it. I am sure there is something to it. I saw the hurricane hit Spassky. It happened the first time they met in Reykjavik, several days before they sat down to play. In my opinion, Spassky was beaten before the match began.”

— Brad Darrach, Life Magazine 1972

4. On intelligence:

It’s very common for an intelligent person to be unhappy- because they don’t know what they should work on.

Knowing you’re meant for more- and not doing more- will drive an ambitious person insane.

5. On the danger of ‘good’ ideas:

"You will fail, because you pursued a good idea. You're like 'Oh, this is a really good idea, I can do this too!' I went to do that, and found it gets exponentially more expensive to compete in that second area. Every day, someone gets up with infinite money and infinite power to do it better than you do it. Figure out what you need in your personal life to be happy. Figure out what you need to do in your professional life. Be the best in the world at that thing. When someone comes to you with all these opportunities, say no. Taking them gets you worse at main thing."

- Michael Saylor, Up Only​

6. On creativity:

“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”

— Dorothy Parker

(h/t Oren Meets World- my favorite YouTube channel right now on brand building)

7. On overnight success:

"There is no such thing as an overnight success. @MrBeast uploaded ~120 videos to YouTube before breaking 1,000 subscribers. He now has: 157M subs."

— Blake Robbins​

Mr. Beast is still playing in decades.

8. On art vs. science:

"I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that. People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, 'I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science,' and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried."

- Steve Jobs at 44​

9. On asking:

— Tyler Bruno (Twitter)

10. On going against mainstream:

“Art lovers were shocked, on occasion even repulsed, when they first beheld the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. I doubt many still feel that way. To the contrary, their art is now found to be deeply moving, invigorating, even psychically healing. That’s not because it has lost its originality with time; rather, that originality has become one with our perception, so that, naturally, it has become a part of us, a reference point, as it were. Similarly, the literary styles of Natsume Sōseki and Ernest Hemingway are now celebrated. Yet both were criticized, at times even ridiculed, by their contemporaries.

Better to evoke a strong response, even a negative one, than to elicit nothing but humdrum comments and lukewarm praise. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert had this to say: 'To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.'"

- Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation​

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