On The Yearly Review, Self-Respect, New Frontiers, The Age of Machines, and Creator Camp
What’s up everyone?!
Happy Monday from Roswell, NM. No alien sightings…yet.
I’m on my way to Sedona, AZ where I’ll be spending the week taking time to read, write, reflect on 2020 (crazy it’s over), and setting goals for/planning 2021.
Here’s what I have for you this week.
🚀On The Yearly Review
This is the annual review that I will be doing. It is from Steve Schlafman, an angel investor and the Founder of High Output.
💪🏻On Self-Respect
Here’s Joan Didion on self-respect:
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”
Read the full article on Brain Pickings.
On New Frontiers
From Self Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society:
“We may re-examine with profit some of Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments on the frontier experience:
For a moment, at the frontier the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant…each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its idea, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever-retreating frontier has been to the United States.
A mature society must make a particular effort to reward its innovators, because its very maturity discourages innovation. Where there is an established way to do almost anything, people are apt to feel that all the pioneering has been done, all the exciting things tried. Though the need for innovation still exists (or may be even greater), it is far from obvious. The challenge is not easily visible. In contrast, in the frontier situation the need is dramatic and universally understood. If the individual has a grain of capacity to improvise and innovate, the situation calls it forth.
🤖On The Age of Machine
The new Greta van Fleet is a journey. It’s amazing.
🏕On Creator Camp
I launched Creator Camp earlier this week.
Creator Camp will be held in May 2021 at a beautiful property just outside of Austin, TX. CC will bring together creatives for a Think Week meets Product Sprint where they have the time to focus on their work while connecting with one another.
Creator Camp will bring creators together in a community to connect, create, and collaborate. Each creator will arrive with a unique challenge or problem and leave with a solution.
The event is going to generate a potent creative energy.
(Bonus: the food will be catered by local Austin favorites.)
The first Creator Camp is $749.
Within 24 hours of launch, most of the spots were filled. We’ve only got a few left.
That’s it for this week.
I’ll talk to you next Monday.
- KB