find Abloh very instructive - his use of rough work as 'evidence of humanity' particularly pertinent now! I also remember a GQ piece with Kanye West where he was stood in some house on the coast of Mexico issuing feedback on multiple projects in music, fashion, architecture etc etc, like an idea DJ – no coincidence they came up together
This take merely echoes very old fodder from the dying paint-by-numbers Emulation Economy.
I.e.: "Top 10 Steve Jobs Success Secrets for Insane Productivity", "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs", "The Next Steve Jobs", "7 Lessons You Can Learn from Steve Jobs", "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs", "Eat what Steve Jobs ate for breakfast, and you too can walk in his footsteps and achieve legendary leadership status..." etc.
The problem is none of us are Virgil Abloh. Not just in our capacities, but also in the way we live our lives, our relationships, our motivations, our desires, our curiosities, our challenges.
Force-fitting a rule of "best practices" thinking is a recipe for self-sabotage where only emergent practices must do. This isn't just a facetious restatement of Oscar Wilde's, "Be yourself, everyone else is already taken." This is that everything about our personal and individual context is different, and even alien, from a Virgil Abloh. Copy-pasting is a recipe for failure.
Because we also must remember that Steve Jobs excelled at dismissing the best medical advice of his oncologist, deciding he could outsmart science, eating nothing but carrots for months, and dying of his treatable pancreatic cancer and orphaning his daughter. Context matters.
find Abloh very instructive - his use of rough work as 'evidence of humanity' particularly pertinent now! I also remember a GQ piece with Kanye West where he was stood in some house on the coast of Mexico issuing feedback on multiple projects in music, fashion, architecture etc etc, like an idea DJ – no coincidence they came up together
I agree with you. I think authenticity becomes that much more important in a world that shines with the glint of AI-generated veneer.
This is a very insightful piece of writing
Thank you!
This take merely echoes very old fodder from the dying paint-by-numbers Emulation Economy.
I.e.: "Top 10 Steve Jobs Success Secrets for Insane Productivity", "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs", "The Next Steve Jobs", "7 Lessons You Can Learn from Steve Jobs", "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs", "Eat what Steve Jobs ate for breakfast, and you too can walk in his footsteps and achieve legendary leadership status..." etc.
The problem is none of us are Virgil Abloh. Not just in our capacities, but also in the way we live our lives, our relationships, our motivations, our desires, our curiosities, our challenges.
Force-fitting a rule of "best practices" thinking is a recipe for self-sabotage where only emergent practices must do. This isn't just a facetious restatement of Oscar Wilde's, "Be yourself, everyone else is already taken." This is that everything about our personal and individual context is different, and even alien, from a Virgil Abloh. Copy-pasting is a recipe for failure.
Because we also must remember that Steve Jobs excelled at dismissing the best medical advice of his oncologist, deciding he could outsmart science, eating nothing but carrots for months, and dying of his treatable pancreatic cancer and orphaning his daughter. Context matters.