5² · 81

Perfect squares, imperfect situations

Dec 31, 2025

Dear friends,


This is the year in 5 points.



  1. 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.

  • 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, engineering scarcity.


  1. Books

  • 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


  1. 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


  1. Behaviour

  • Stop thinking in tweets. Flair without depth is meaningless.

  • Every time you feel the urge to doomscroll, elect to wash your hands, eat an orange, or tweeze your eyebrows. This kicks in a brain reset.

  • Coworking = noworking.

  • Reach out immediately if you can.

  • Behave like the person you want to be.


  1. Lessons

  • Creation is as much restraint as it is expression. Saying no is more important than saying yes, in many cases.

  • 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 pucks. Keep at it.

  • Success has never been zero sum. Understand circumstance.



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.