In 1874, a group of painters known as the Batignolles group held an exhibition – in the Batignolles district of Paris.
People mostly went to mock them, howling with laughter, whispering and shouting insults, even spitting on the paintings. The critics printed stories calling their work, “nauseating and revolting,” “dangerous,” “offensive,” and “horrible.”
At their next auction, the hecklers loudly interrupted the bidding. Some paintings sold for hardly the cost of the frames. The painters’ portrait commissions dried up – nobody wanted to associate with them. They got by on dinner invitations from their few supporters.
When the Batignolles group had put together their exhibition, they had made a pact: Either participate, or submit your work to the Salon – a government-sponsored who’s who of painting, juried by the establishment, who had routinely rejected their work. So, either take a stand and do the art you believe in, or once again try to fit in.
The Batignolles group became known by a name foisted on them as an insult: Impressionists.
The artists who participated in the debut exhibition included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, and Renoir – names now synonymous with one of the most impactful artistic movements ever.
The artists who decided once again to seek validation from the status quo were Fantin, Gonzalés, Guillemet, Henner, Legros, and Tissot. The only name recognizable to anyone but the most ardent art-history buff would be Manet – though when you mention him many think you mean Monet.
Aphorism: “To escape criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” —Elbert Hubbard
Cool:TRE (Tension and Trauma Reduction Therapy) is simple, but powerful (use with caution!)
Best, David P.S. Thank you to Atul Raj for having me on The Genius Talks podcast.
If you’ve ever used Photoshop without knowing “Snap to grid” was on, you know it’s a frustrating feeling. You try to paint in a certain spot, then inexplicably your cursor jumps to another.
This is what it’s like talking to many people.
It’s normal that, due to flaws in communication or interpretation, what you mean to say is not always what people understand, but snap-to-grid thinkers have a limited number of points to which they will jump in any conversation topic. It’s usually the 1–3 hot-button items that are regularly being harped on by the media.
The topics which they can talk about are limited, and they can only say about each things they already heard from someone else.
To be fair, we’re all a little snap-to-grid. Our thoughts are mostly products of what information we’ve been exposed to, and the subjects we can even consider are but meatballs and noodles suspended in the soup of media and social influence that surrounds us.
Additionally, the thoughts of others are hand- and foot-holds on scaffolding we can climb to reach new heights. You don’t have to build a personal moral framework from scratch when you can start with, say, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism.
But the more different places you get information, the closer you study that information – so that you don’t merely accept what’s fed to you but instead consider what you agree and don’t agree with – and the more you think and write to yourself, ostensibly free of outside influence, the higher fidelity grid your thoughts navigate. If most people are at 1,000 pixels, you can make it to 100, 10, or 5.
If you’re really diligent, you can sometimes break free of the grid altogether, and start painting at the pixel level.
Aphorism: “Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.” –Horace Mann
The term “slop” has been floating around. Most often, it’s called “AI slop,” but slop has been around for centuries.
The original slop rebels were a group of kids who, incredibly, made a mark on art history. They were in their upper teens and early twenties, and were meeting secretly in their homes and studios in central London.
They were students at the Royal Academy of Art, which had a dominant influence on what was considered “good” art. They quietly leaked their existence at the Academy’s Summer Exhibition by signing their paintings with their group’s initials after their names: “P.R.B.”
They attracted the ire of none other than Charles Dickens, who published a screed mocking their “mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting” work.
They called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Despite their name, they actually worshipped the Renaissance master, Raphael. What they had a problem with was how the style of painting Raphael had perfected had become a formula that the Academy passed down, making all the “good” art look the same.
Kind of like how our current iteration of AI-generated art and writing is formulaically derived by a mathematically-average ideal of what people consider “good.”
This is so perfect you’re going to think I’m making this up, but they referred to the formulaic art by a term they invented based upon the name of the late founder of the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. They called him “Sir Sloshua,” and the soulless, unoriginal work promoted by the academy, “slosh.”
The P.R.B. felt the formulaic approach had disconnected artists from reality. Their early doctrines – yes, this group of young punks had doctrines – called for artists to “have genuine ideas to express,” “study Nature attentively,” and be inspired by previous art only through what is “direct and serious and heartfelt,” ignoring what is “conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.”
The result in the painting Dickens hated so much was Jesus as a little boy in the carpentry workshop of his parents. An old woman’s hands were swollen and a man’s arms were hairy, veiny, and sunburnt. Jesus himself was, according to Dickens, a “hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy.”
In only a few short years of their official existence, the P.R.B. made declarations that echoed throughout not just painting, but literature and design, inspiring the Arts and Crafts movement, Oscar Wilde, and the fantasy worlds and characters of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, we need the Pre-Algorithmite Bloggerhood. AI slop is just another step on a path that has existed since Academic art, and that descended sharply with the dawn of the algorithm, which has determined what is “good” by the formulaic application of whatever can be measured as interesting in the eyes of the lowest common denominator.
So write (or otherwise create) based upon your actual observations and feelings. Abandon slop-purveying rubrics such as niches, hashtags, and personal brands. Create something that is real and honest and beautiful.
Maybe 175 years from now they’ll be writing about a different P.R.B.
Book:Four Thousand Weeks (Amazon) is full of mind-benders about the nature of time and what it means to be productive.
There are aspiration-driven desires, and obligation-driven desires.
Our obligations come from a sense of duty to ourselves and others. We want to make money and participate in society. We want to make our families feel proud. We want to stay consistent with our identities as reliable people.
Our aspirations come from within. We often can’t put them into words. We want to write novels, make music, and build beautiful software, or just kinda ya know, do things.
But obligations tend to be stronger motivators of follow-through. That you lose track of time while painting gets you started, but won’t help you finish.
Ongoing projects are great because they give you ready-to-go obligations that help achieve your aspirations. As expression pours out, you have containers to catch it.
You freewrite, then send a daily newsletter
You have conversations, then publish a weekly podcast
You build community, then hold a yearly conference
Well-placed obligations stop procrastination and fulfill aspirations better than waiting for inspiration.
Aphorism: “Find what you love and let it kill you.” —Charles Bukowski
Book:The Organized Mind (Amazon) shows you how to think straight in the age of information overload.
What used to take a weekend and required coding skills now takes a lunch break and doesn’t. What took millions of dollars and wrangling a cast and crew can be rendered while you check your phone.
So what is the result of a world where anyone can create anything in a click?
Jevon’s paradox states that when technology makes something cheaper, demand rises. So when executing ideas becomes cheaper, you suddenly have more ideas. If you’ve made something, you can attest that once you realize “you can just do things,” the idea floodgates open. The realization things are possible is in itself a huge reduction in costs.
But as you’re enjoying your newfound creative powers, everyone else is enjoying theirs, too.
What most won’t be able to do is focus long enough to make something deep and lasting. (Publishing platforms are made addictive on the creator side, too.)
In a world where skills are on sale, good taste and follow-through are at a premium.
Aphorism: “For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of ‘the idea guys’; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun.” —Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO
Book:The Creative Act (Amazon) is legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s treatise on creativity as a way of being.
It’s about that mysterious thing that happened. Most people think it was this, but the documentary shows it was actually that.
They interviewed this one lady, who explained that what people think is this was just manipulation on the part of some guy. That guy said what really happened was that, but you could tell he was lying.
How? Well, when they interviewed the lady, there was soft, blue lighting, and very gently playing, touching music. When they interviewed the guy, the main color on the screen was brown, and they lit it so there were dark shadows on his facial features. While he was talking, they cut to a document showing he was lying slowly moving across the screen, at the pace of the creepy music they had playing.
Documentaries suck. There’s probably no worse way to learn about something than a documentary.
I know that sounds crazy, and I’m painting with a broad brush. No doubt there are some subjects that should be covered in the documentary format, such as nature and visual things such as art or events that were caught almost entirely on film.
But if you really pay attention to most documentaries, you can see the tricks they pull to try to persuade you of one thing or another. Tricks that don’t have anything to do with what evidence they’re actually presenting to support that argument.
The actual content of most documentaries is also very thin. You could learn more about a subject in 90 minutes of reading Wikipedia than 90 minutes watching a documentary.
The next time you think of watching a documentary some streaming platform cobbled together to get you to mentally justify your monthly subscription, consider reading about it instead.
Aphorism: “[A writer] wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living – so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.” —Virginia Woolf
Book:Clear Thinking (Amazon) is Shane Parrish’s guide to recognizing and acting on ordinary moments with extraordinary potential.
Best, David P.S. Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image warned – 60 years ago – of the dangers of image-based media. Here’s a summary.
You don’t know what you’re making until you make it. So it’s normal to begin some in-finite project – such as a blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel – and soon after decide it’s not for you.
You start a project like this with an aspirational inkling. You reach out into the void and see if what you can grab. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes what you grasped slips away.
The greatest irony of projects that seem they should go on forever is, if they fulfill their purposes as vehicles for personal growth, they will become obsolete. You learn quickly in the beginning, but that rate of learning slows down. So you must choose to either chase diminishing returns, or stop.
Just as why you began may not have been clear, why you stopped may not have been, either. So I hereby grant you permission to give yourself a retroactive pat on the back for the ongoing projects you’ve started then abandoned.
That podcast with two episodes? Great job! You learned about audio production.
That YouTube channel with three videos? Impressive! You got better at being on-camera.
That open-mic comedy set you delivered only once? Well done! You got a feel for how the spoken word lands in a room.
You learn more abandoning an in-finite project than never starting at all. So if you’ve started something you’ve stopped, retroactive kudos!
Aphorism: “I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Cool:NaturalReader is an app for iOS and Android that I use to listen to drafts of my writing, read by an AI voice.
Not all who wander are lost, but most who wander will at some point feel lost.
When you “delve” – when you follow a line of curiosity deeply – you will end up in some place where you can’t explain where you are or why you’re there.
We’re taught to have a plan for where we’re going and what we’re doing. We’re taught to expect a certain outcome from certain actions. So in the “delve dip,” most people freak out.
But the delve dip is where you collect the loose ends you can connect and lift yourself back up so you can see where you are and where you might go. Usually, that’s to a really interesting place!
Even after I’ve been in the delve dip many times, and come out with life-changing and career-defining ideas, it still scares me sometimes.
But by definition, nothing exciting happens when you know where you are and where you’re going, which is a proxy for saying nothing original or interesting happens.
Most people never make it through the delve dip. If they’d persevere, they’d learn that delving is part of the process.
Aphorism: “Just as food eaten without caring for it is turned into loathsome nourishment, so study without a taste for it spoils memory, by retaining nothing which it has taken in.” —Leonardo da Vinci
As the world mechanized, so, too, did we. Output became measured, tasks became defined, calendars got filled.
Put enough holes in Swiss cheese and eventually you have no cheese. The mechanistic approach to productivity has hit the limits of the human mind and body.
The same technological advances that have optimized our wetware to its limits have also changed our economic system. The classic understanding of productivity was based upon the idea that if you did this, you would get that. But economies of scale have created a winner-take-all environment. Winner-take-all across many, many, more games, but still winner-take-all.
And so too much productivity advice assumes predictable outcomes in a stable world, executed with an absence of intuition under perfect discipline.
To be productive now is a dance with chance. Like any dance, the steps aren’t linear (not even in line dancing), and it takes some improvisation.
Fortunately, this allows us to be more human, not less.
Aphorism: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” —Linus Pauling
Book:Buy Back Your Time (Amazon) is SaaS coach Dan Martell’s guide for focusing on high-value actions.
$2,000 ergonomic chairs only exist because sitting is bad for you.
The mediocre middle is full of steady-state defaults like this. They’re the easiest things to accept, but they come at hard costs.
To avoid this middle is to live the “barbell life.” Like a barbell, focus your efforts on the extremes, and keep it thin in the middle. Instead of a steady state in the middle, get the best of both worlds at the extreme ends.
Instead of living stressed in an overpriced city, live a relaxed life in the country, with high-energy trips to the city.
Instead of writing on a computer, full of distractions, write on a typewriter, but publish online.
Instead of having social apps a tap away, put them on a separate phone.
Instead of getting terrible sleep with your partner, get separate beds – save cuddles for Saturday-afternoon naps.
Instead of reading a new mid-wit business book, read ancient philosophy, or the latest Substack.
Instead of the ergonomic chair, stand, sit on whatever, leverage AI to work while walking – overall, keep moving.
The “middle” is subjective, as are the extreme ends of the barbell. The barbell life isn’t one-size-fits all – that would be too middle.
What’s in your barbell life?
Book:The Medici (Amazon) is a gripping account of the family that made the Renaissance.
Cool:Silverant (Amazon) makes water bottles out of extremely light but also non-toxic titanium.
Best, David P.S. Play sure bets and wildcards with the barbell strategy.
