"It's about recognizing what people want, and serving it up simply and succinctly." "It's about removing the mental and physical clutter created by unnecessary choice."

"Problems are the most effective springboard for innovations."

"The approach that works best on a website or a billboard is likely not the same as what works best on Instagram, and vice versa."

"As much as people claim they want excitement and freshness, it's hard to change ingrained behaviors."

"everything we do as humans, whether we know it or not, is ultimately motivated by knowledge of our own mortality."

Obsessed by Emily Heyward provides a series of suggestions and considerations for brands hitting the market. Heyward also explores nuances of human behavior and exhibits them through a series of chapters and case studies in marketing.

The 2020 Porchlight Marketing & Sales Book of the Year The cofounder and chief branding officer of Red Antler, the branding and marketing company for startups and new ventures, explains how hot new brands like Casper, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, and Everlane build devoted fan followings right out of the gate. We're in the midst of a startup revolution, with new brands popping up every day, taking over our Instagram feeds and vying for our affection. Every category is up for grabs, and traditional brands are seeing their businesses erode as hundreds of small companies encroach on their territory, each hoping to become the next runaway success. But it's not enough to have a great idea, or a cool logo. Emily Heyward founded Red Antler, the Brooklyn based brand and marketing company, to help entrepreneurs embed brand as a driver of business success from the beginning. In Obsessed, Heyward outlines the new principles of what it takes to build and launch a brand that has people queuing up to buy it on opening day. She takes you behind the scenes of the creation of some of today's hottest new brands, showing you: • How Casper was able to upend the mattress industry by building a beloved brand where none had existed before • How the dating app Hinge won a fanatical user base and great word-of-mouth with the promise that the app was "designed to be deleted" • Why luggage startup Away, now valued at $1.4 billion, could build their brand around love of travel by launching with just one product--a hard-shell carry-on suitcase--rather than a whole range of luggage offerings. Whether you're starting a new business, launching a new product line, or looking to refresh a brand for a new generation of customers, Obsessed shows you why the old rules of brand-building no longer apply, and what really works for today's customers.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Obsessed

"I was at ease in everything, to be sure, but at the same time satisifed with nothing. Each joy made me desire another."

"I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life."

"Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate - for them."

"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."

"Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate."

"The judgment you are passing on others eventually snaps back in your face, causing some damage."

"The Fall" by Albert Camus is a fascinating read. Camus is a hardcore existentialist (which I'm not particularly in agreement with) but his ideas remain monumental to the mind. These are a collection of quotes I gathered while reading the book.

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

writing

Reading & Writing

The Fall

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking."

"It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end."

"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than other derives its nobility from the abject birth."

"Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it."

"The mind's first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first discovers is a contradiction."

"In reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious."

"Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place."

"There is scarcely any passion without struggle."

"For conscience moves swiftly or withdraws within itself. It has to be caught on the wing, at that barely perceptible moment when it glances fleetingly at itself."

"A single truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence."

"Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage."

"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus is a fascinating read. Camus is a hardcore existentialist (which I'm not particularly in agreement with) but his ideas remain monumental to the mind. These are a collection of quotes I gathered while reading the book.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • An internationally acclaimed author delivers one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, showing a way out of despair and reaffirming the value of existence. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide—the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly presents a crucial exposition of existentialist thought.

The Myth of Sisyphus

“This is how I live, I am thinking.”﻿“But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.”

“I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.” - Patti Smith

Smith’s Identity

“No one wins anything; winning is an illusion” - Patti Smith

“Winning”

“Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images?” - Patti Smith

Passing Ideas

<ul><li>“Such things that disappear in time we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.” - Patti Smith</li><li>“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone.” - Patti Smith</li><li>“Why is it that we lost the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone.” - Patti Smith</li></ul>

Passing Time

Patti Smith is a brilliant writer. I’ve previously read “Just Kids” and loved it. M Train is a writer’s collection of coffee, love, and art. How each relate, and how life is an art.

From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” (Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.” M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith

health

Health

timemanagement

Time Management

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

M Train

”The creation of Jazz is therefore a story of expanding creative alternatives, energized by new educational resources, profit-making opportunities, and social connections in urban America; but it is also a story of individual and group aspirations stymied, and sometimes crushed, by a partially y democratic society that upheld policies of exclusion, unbridled economic competition, and atomizing individualism.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Creative Alternatives

<ul><li>More than any other art form, Jazz was shaped by, and spoke of, these cultural reconciliations and compromises</li><li>The music was highly rhythmic, the contribution of the drums and of its symbiotic relation to dance</li><li>The music, because of its rich spiritual and social role, was complex</li></ul>

The Art Form Of Jazz

<ul><li>Musicians had absorbed the education and diverse stimuli provided by the experience of migration, they entered a stage of independent and self-definition, in which the materials of the common musical culture became elements of distinctive and acknowledged personal styles</li><li>As musicians adopted these new views, jazz shed some of its early identity as a folk music and acquired a few of the formal characteristics of an elite or art musical</li></ul>

Migration & Jazz

“Sweet jazz dancing signified a temporary abandonment of <a href="https://www.almanac.com/victorian-era-etiquette-and-manners">Victorian decorum</a> and manners.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Victorian Decorum

“In creating jazz, black players exercised a kind of cultural leadership in America that has rarely been permitted or acknowledged.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Cultural Leadership

“Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, speaks to the possibilities available to the individual in a democracy.”

”With jazz, they were not lost in urban America.” - <a href="https://www.burtonperetti.com">Burton W. Peretti</a>

Comfort In Art

Jazz was a groundbreaking art form that allowed black musicians to thrive in urban America. This book is a great study for those interested in the medium.

As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz", states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy". Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.

music

Music

The Creation of Jazz

<ul><li>“He made only <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000015/">three motion pictures</a>, yet sixty years after his death he remains one of the world’s iconic movie stars.”</li><li>”Jimmy, in his few years, had lived as much as some people do by 90.” </li></ul>-<a href="http://havebookwilltravel.com/peter-l-winkler/">Peter L. Winckler</a>Jimmy Dean caused more to transpire socially than many of the great rulers of history*

Jimmy (James) Dean

“He seemed to be absolutely uncontrolled. But as I watched him develop in his role, I realized this young man is one of the most disciplined actors I have ever seen

“Everything he heard, everything he read, everything he did seemed to have new meaning for Jimmy. Until then he had understood everything, but now he was able to apply it. For the first time, acting made sense to him.” - Peter L. Winkler

Active Student

“He could hang on to anybody. Anybody that he felt he could get something out of - not money-wise or material-wise. He felt that any knowledge he could gain from anybody was valuable. As a matter of fact his time was valuable. He seemed to be in a hurry about something. I don’t know what. Maybe a feeling that he wasn’t going to live very long.” - Peter L. Winkler

Knowledge is Valuable

“He was an attentive listener and had a tenacious memory. He picked up a great deal from the people with whom he was associating, and he made it a point to study in detail any subjects discussed which were unfamiliar to him. In an amazingly short time he became well-versed in the subjects of modern art, contemporary literature, and progressive classical music.” - Peter L. Winkler

Variety Of Interests

Jimmy wanted to learn everything and compress what he knew into one energy force representing “something perfect.” He had to dance and sing, learn photography and <a href="https://m.facebook.com/20011366374/photos/a.10150264466086375/10151402515021375/?type=3">bullfighting</a>, because he knew that what he’d learn could come through in some other way, would make up qualities he would project as an artist - as an actor.” - Peter L. Winkler

“Something Perfect”

“I studied violin, played in concerts, tap-danced on theatre stages but most of all I like art, to mold and create things with my hands.””I think my life will be devoted to art and dramatics.””As one strives to make a goal in a game there should be a goal in this crazy world for each of us.””That’s what I’d like to be - a hermit. Then they couldn’t touch me. They’re all just a bunch of leeches.””I believe in freedom, not God. If you want to call freedom God, then you can say I believe in God, but I say I believe in freedom.””Discoveries can be inside the person.”

Jimmy (James) Dean is one of the most fascinating persons that has ever lived. He made an incredible impact on Hollywood and was fond of all genres of art and creation. One of my personal icons…

In the decades following his death, many of those who knew James Dean best––actors, directors, friends, lovers (both men and women), photographers, and Hollywood columnists––shared stories of their first-person experiences with him in interviews and in the articles and autobiographies they wrote. Their recollections of Dean became lost in fragile back issues of movie magazines and newspapers and in out-of-print books that are extremely hard to find. Until now. The Real James Dean is the first book of its kind: a rich collection spanning six decades of writing in which many of the people whose lives were touched by Dean recall their indelible experiences with him in their own words. Here are the memorable personal accounts of Dean from his high school and college drama teachers; the girl he almost married; costars like Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Jim Backus, and Raymond Massey; directors Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens; entertainer Eartha Kitt; gossip queen Hedda Hopper; the passenger who accompanied Dean on his final, fatal road trip; and a host of his other friends and colleagues.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

entertainment

Entertainment

Real James Dean

”Life is an art, not a science. Your mileage may vary. Take what you need and leave the rest.” - Austin Kleon

Life as Art

“When you pay attention to your life, it not only provides you with the material for your art, it also helps you fall in love with your life.” - Austin Kleon

Pay Attention

<ul><li>“Drawing is simply another way of seeing, which we don’t really do as adults.” - <a href="https://art21.org/artist/chris-ware/">Chris Ware</a></li><li>”Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a mediation.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson, <a href="https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/the-minds-eye/">The Mind’s Eye</a></li><li>”If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful.” - E.O. Plaven</li><li>”Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.” - <a href="http://www.frederickfranck.org">Frederick Franck</a> </li></ul>

Drawing

“New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.” - Austin Kleon

Juxtapositions

”Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist’s job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can’t see it.” - Austin Kleon

Repulsive Beauty

“No artist can work simply for results; he must also like the work of getting them.” - <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/nyregion/robert-f-capon-who-wrote-of-god-and-food-dies-at-87.html">Robert Farrar Capon</a>

Enjoying The Process

“Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful.” - Austin Kleon

Planting Seeds

“Creativity is about connection - you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work - but it is also without disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others.” - Austin Kleon

Connection Vs. Disconnection

“There is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.” - Austin Kleon

Returem

”None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that everyday. That’s it.”

”I think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it… I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.”

”There is Art left to be made in this world.” (1956-2018) ❤️

“Keep Going” by Austin Kleon teaches the creative to maintain their endurance and energy. There is no retirement in the creative’s life…

The world is crazy. Creative work is hard. And nothing is getting any easier! In his previous books—Steal Like an Artistand Show Your Work!, New York Times bestsellers with over a million copies in print combined—Austin Kleon gave readers the key to unlock their creativity and then showed them how to share it. Now he completes his trilogy with his most inspiring work yet. Keep Going gives the reader life-changing, illustrated advice and encouragement on how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself in the face of personal burnout or external distractions. Here is how to Build a Bliss Station—a place or fixed period where you can disconnect from the world. How to see that Every Day Is Groundhog Day—yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, so just do what you can do today. How to Forget the Noun, Do the Verb—stop worrying about being a “painter” and just paint. Keep working. Keep playing. Keep searching. Keep giving. Keep living. Keep Going. It’s exactly the message all of us need, at exactly the right time.

creativity

Creativity

Keep Going

“The Gothic speaks to this sense that we are all entangled in a messy middle, living in weird borderless biomes whose complex networks we can barely fathom.”

“Pointed arches stretch up towards God, flooding the interior with divine light and inspiring solemn awe, what one commentator called ‘an artificial infinite’.” - Roger Luckhurst

Gothic Architecture

“Monsters are cultural bodies that mark a ‘crisis of category’.” - <a href="https://www.jeffreyjeromecohen.com">Jeffery Jerome Cohen</a>

Monsters

“Humans exist in complex, interdependent, cross-species assemblages that drives a more subtle kind of monster.” - Roger Luckhurst

Cross-species Assemblages

“The octopus is likely to be ‘the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien’.” - Peter Godfrey-Smith, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Evolution-Intelligent-ebook/dp/B01LXKA6FO/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=e5387ccf-f186-446b-bb23-70914bd82dc1">The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016)</a>

Tentacles

“The biological world of fungi is highly ordered, marked by open-ended cooperative assemblages, ecologies whose complexities scientists are still trying to grasp.” - Roger Luckhurst

Fungi

“Gothic” by Roger Luckhurst is a plentiful book full of Gothic information. Ranging from categories such as architecture, design, film and television.

A richly illustrated history of the Gothic across a wide range of media, including architecture, literature, and film The word Gothic conjures associations with the dark and melancholy, the weird and feared, and haunted places and people. In Gothic, Roger Luckhurst offers readers an unprecedented look at the ways this uncanny style has manifested itself through architecture, literature, film, art, video games, and more. From the works of Victor Hugo and E. T. A. Hoffman to Southern Gothic, ancient folklore, and classic horror movies, Roger Luckhurst explores how an aesthetic that began in the margins has been reinvented through the centuries to become part of mainstream global culture. Organizing his wide-ranging history by theme, Luckhurst begins with Gothic architecture and form, including such elements as the arch, the house, and ruins. He considers how the Gothic is depicted in rural and urban settings, as well as in the wilderness and borderlands. And he delves into Gothic traditions and settings around the world, from the sublime Alps and Australian outback to the Arctic wasteland, from the dark folkloric realm of the forest to the postindustrial landscapes of abandoned hospitals and asylums, and then beyond the bounds of the planet to unknowable cosmic horror. Luckhurst investigates the monsters that mirror ourselves and society, and demonstrates that as the Gothic has traveled across the globe and through time, it has morphed according to the shape of our changing fears and anxieties. Filled with a wealth of color illustrations, Gothic will satisfy anyone yearning to lift the veil on our fascination with the eerie, morbid, and supernatural.

product

Product & Design

Gothic

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts.

Who is Yayoi Kusama?

Yayoi Kusama is a prominent artists in Contemporary art, Feminist art, Pop art, Minimalism and Environmental art.

Type of Art

“From the point of view of one who creates, everything is a gamble, a leap into the unknown.”

“Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos/ Polka dots are a way to infinity.”

“I hope that the power of art can make the world more peaceful.”

Yayoi Kusama is a brilliant artist who pushed the boundaries of all artistic fields she pursued.

I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.'Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging autobiography tells the story of her life and extraordinary career in her own words, revealing her as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde. In addition to her artwork, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, Manhattan Suicide Addict and Violet Obsession.

travel

Travel

Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

“Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you.”

Andy Warhol wasn’t just creating art, he was creating contemporary culture. Warhol's "Factory" was his tool for creating progressive culture. He was able to jump from generation to generation and remain relevant.

Warhol's Impact on the Art World

Andy Warhol predicted that everybody in the future will receive at least <a href="https://www.npr.org/2008/10/08/95516647/warhol-was-right-about-15-minutes-of-fame">15 minutes of fame</a>. This couldn't be more true with the boom of the internet in the technological age.

15 Minutes of Fame

Warhol had a strong relationship with <a href="https://www.basquiat.com">Jean-Michel Basquiat</a>. They were well acquainted and collaborated on a series of pieces. Later in their careers, they fell out and rarely spoke. Eventually, Warhol passed in a hospital and Basquiat passed due to an overdose of various drugs.

Andy's Bond with Basquiat

“Most young kings get their head cut off”

"The Andy Warhol Diaries" on Netflix was highly influential to me. The docu-series highlighted some of my favorite artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The series emphasized the importance of Andy Warhol's contribution to contemporary culture.

After he's shot in 1968, Andy Warhol begins documenting his life and feelings. Those diaries, and this series, reveal the secrets behind his persona. Watch trailers & learn more.

Obsessed

The Fall

The Myth of Sisyphus

M Train

The Creation of Jazz

Andy Hauptli