My relationship with @celiapreihs is the foundation of all the good things in my life, and has amplified the quality of hundreds of relationships with people I've got to know and learn from this year.
Shiny objects make us duller:
The grass is always greener until you're standing on it. "No" is still the highest ROI word in my vocabulary.
The internet is very, very big:
Make something work for one person (could also be yourself), then work on distribution.
Scale is seductive but you can't get it if you don't have something people want.
You can't please everyone:
If you could, there would be no point anyway - it's tough when someone doesn't love your work but it's how markets function.
The blows hit harder in the early rounds, just keep getting up.
Rest works:
I've found stepping away from a screen to be one of the most productive acts of 2020.
The sensory overload of Twitter in particular: highly intoxicating in both directions.
The price of a good lesson:
We trusted a few people we shouldn't have this year and took some decent sized losses as a result, it seems (to me) that these mistakes don't stop until the price you pay is so significant you'll never forget it.
Design for today, not one day:
I met a lot of people that are objectively successful on paper that don't enjoy how they have to spend their days.
Almost always, they seem to optimizing for the outcome vs. the process.
Progress isn't linear:
Especially when you have a little bit of leverage. One day of inspired execution can generate 100x the results of 30 days of uninspired grinding.
Almost everyone is reasonable:
Huge lesson from answering hundreds of customer support emails - practice a little bit of empathy and you'll realize most people are just tired and busy, but incredibly forgiving of honest mistakes.
Everyone you admire is still figuring it out:
I had the opportunity to get to know people I genuinely thought were a different species a couple of years ago.
They aren't. Everyone is trying their best, and those ahead of you are just riding a good guess they made.
Happy new year all.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
transparency threads have been stopped and started many times, because this process has taken many twists and turns
it began as a free mint, open for an hour, a nod to the open edition meta of the time and the internet's most prolific memetic character
provenance wise - it follows checks, a long-form generative art project that comments on verification in the age of the internet, and gives agency to collectors to create immutable, onchain pieces themselves
as you can probably infer from my tweets, the idea of shipping a finished collection in the middle of what we are currently experiencing in image generation does not feel that special or interesting
some feedback we've gotten along the way on recognizability is also well taken
what we're currently exploring is the ability to "drop" on opepen — and give collectors full agency on how they'd like to proceed (lock or unlock canvas)
maintain max optionality on both sides
there have been many iterations that I would love to put in the collection but wouldn't want to make 16k of them, feels dilutive and again not that exciting