A surprisingly technopositive view from Derek Sivers on AI learning from your own public content:

Come and get me. I want my words to improve your future decisions.

I’m trying to thoroughly write my thought processes, values, and worldview, so that you can remember it, re-create it and improve upon it. (Remember me. Re-create me. Improve upon me.)

Another case for how a website can become a life's work. And how that life's work can have impact, even if it's obfuscated. Perhaps that's the ego-less way of viewing it, assuming your words and images will be taken out of context and converted to a single data point in a larger model.

Though, a site unto itself is still more inspiring since it's a portrait of a life. We're wired for that. There's more meaning to derive from an individual than a summarized report.

So I think I'll keep at it.

Why Bother? From Kyle Webster's newsletter:

It’s not that your work, itself, will change the world; no, only a few people in history will create something that resonates so strongly that it forces people to stand up, pay attention, and actually act on the feelings your masterpiece has stirred within them.

Instead, it’s the mini-milestones you achieve while doing your work that matter because each of these little ‘wins’ makes you feel good. Feeling good is the foundation for doing good. Positive emotions facilitate cooperation, unity and understanding in a community.

It's not explicitly said, but I'll add how wonderful it is that skill does not necessarily make a difference. The doing and growing are what gives life and bouyancy. Engagement > Product.

A wonderful read in it's entirety on James Gurney's Substack. From "Should Art Be About Personal Expression?":

Many of the greatest works of art have come from enigmatic individuals like Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Homer, about whom we know very little. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. The miracle of their work is that the range of their emotional expression seems to extend beyond the scope of a single person’s experience.

Each of these creators looked into themselves, but in so doing, they saw beyond themselves.

Ultimately, we end up starting from a place where we're trying to express what feels like is uniquely our's. But, the further and further you go, the more you start to see yourself more as a vessel. What pours out of the brush and pen and piano and terminal are alignments with a greater Truth.

It's one thing to do work in spite of nay-sayers and critics. It's another, greater challenge to continue on in a direction different from where the admirers and allure of "success" draws you.

Tim Kreider exploring the stubborn nature of painters De Chirico and Derain:

What I can’t help but admire about them is their indifference to critics and admirers alike, their untouchable self-assurance in their own idiosyncratic instincts and judgment. I admire their doggedly following their own paths, even if I’m not as interested in where they led. I admire their cussedness. It’s a value-neutral quality in itself, cussedness, amoral and inæsthetic, and not one you can really emulate, anyway—it would be like trying to imitate originality. But such artists’ careers demonstrate that it is at least possible to move through this world unswerved by its capricious granting or withholding of approval. They’re examples, good or bad, to their fellow artists as we all feel our blind, groping way forward—or, sometimes, back—through the dark of creation.

Kreider's closing metaphor on moving through "The dark of creation" is something that the richest creation requires returning to time and time again.

(Found while digging deeper on the always fantastic weekly newsletter by Austin Kleon, this week on writing.)

Sourced from Austin Kleon in his newsletter this week, Brian Eno's 2011 Moscow lecture.

Eno talks on how music (especially classical music) was a performative, hierarchy driven medium. Recorded music, however, takes out that hierarchy and makes the act of creating music more like painting. Really beautiful ideas, the whole thing is worth a listen.