Dear friends,
Truthfully, I remember very little of 2025: it consisted of many homes, many cities, many attempts, many reframes.
This is the year in 5 points.
—
Ponder
Hans Obrist, as a director of the Serpentine Galleries and renowned curator, still hosts meetings with budding artists at obscure locations in inconspicuous places. Dedication to craft, low ego.
Nietzsche was known to take regular walks with a notepad in hand, sometimes 8+ hours daily in the Swiss Alps, for clarity of thought.
IBM commissioned the Eames Office to make films in the 1960s. They began as a humble architecture studio and became one of the greatest science communicators by proximity.
Anna Wintour was fired from Harper's Bazaar in the 1970s for making shoots "too edgy." Her boss told her she'd never understand American fashion. She became Vogue's editor-in-chief a decade later.
Most farms only offer one A5 wagyu cow per auction. Engineered scarcity, and the economics of desire.
Books and Media
The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel
The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Math Art by Stephen Ornes
Words
Esoteric
一步一步 — "one foot one foot"
もったいない — regret over waste, reverence for what exists
Provenance
Syndrome
Functional Behaviours
Stop thinking in tweets. Think in sentences, paragraphs, stretches. Flair, without depth, is meaningless.
Every time you feel the urge to doomscroll, read a chapter of a zen storybook, tweeze your eyebrows, do something to kick in a sensory trigger for a brain reset.
Coworking = noworking, realistically.
Reach out as you find them, not after adding them to a list.
Behave as the person you want to be, not as you are.
Lessons
Creation is as much restraint as it is expression. In how you speak, compose, share, show.
Lack of clarity is the blocker to execution. Context shapes form.
You must learn to hold uncertainty. A thought is creativity; (over)thinking is paralysis.
Don’t play hockey with shiny puck syndrome. Keep at it.
Success has never been zero sum. Understand circumstance, please.
Jolie
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Special thanks to: James, Henry, Daisy, Dad, Olivia, Andrew, Alex.
Anna, Alicia, Spencer, Hardeep, Chloe, Edward, Isaac, Sam, Jas, Krish.
Sylvie, Ali, Sasha, Wojciech and Agata, Ashlee, Nick.