A week or two ago Brain Picking‘s Maria Popova culled some inspirational messages about finding your “true purpose” and how to go about actually doing it. She quotes Paul Graham 2006 article “How to Do What You Love,” Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” Hugh MacLeod’s “Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity” as well as words from Lewis Hyde, Steve Jobs and Robert Krulwich. She ends with The Holstee Manifesto (above), which I think is super cheesy and comes too close to branding creative living with vague and pseudo inspirational messages like “All emotions are beautiful,” and “Getting lost will help you find yourself.” It’s the kind of graphic I could easily see printed on a water bottle in Lululemon. (In fact, her post ends with a link to where you can buy Holstee Manifesto paraphernalia, like a baby bib.)
Product plugs aside, Popova does isolate some great advice from the books these men (yeah – all men, where the lady-thinkers at?), like:
“What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world…If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.”
Agreed. One thing that Popova does really well on her blog is bring together items that are considered un-timely by our current Internet standards and content expectations, ignoring the call for the prestige and instead, creating a unique space where she’s created her own brand of prestige. Read the rest of her excellent post.
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