Assorted links from week22, 2024

☠️ I’ve already sent this post to a few friends last week. Henrik at his best: Don't sacrifice the wrong thing.

You don’t have to do things others do, or have things they have, at the expense of the deeper things you want. You really don’t. Almost everything is an option. You have full permission to ask yourself what really matters to you—whatever that is—and then optimize for that in all hard tradeoffs of life.

👟 Merch has been in the news lately. This topic is very close to heart. Especially as it relates to our own identities [at least, how we perceive ourselves] -for better and worse. I enjoyed what both Ana and Eugene had to say about it. And for the ones in the back: it’s all about connections and conversations. Period. Everything is merch.

Supreme traced a social and cultural topography of its brand’s global community, but that community formed exactly because you could only buy Supreme at its Lafayette Street shop in New York. Through its merch, Supreme held this community together across time and geography. It connected people, conversations, and symbols into one Supreme social network.

🖼 When David writes about culture, it’s always worth a read. Culture is an Ecosystem: A Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism.

😴 This is something we might chat on a weekly basis with both Mathilde and Max [my co-founder at Objet] — the distinction between Lazy Work and Good Work might not be what we think it is. Also, this poem 🤯

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:

A wise old owl lived in an oak,

The more he saw the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard,

Why aren’t we all like that old bird?