Theme 15: Rebel

Our destiny is all tied up together. You can't be a human being by yourself. You can't be white by yourself, either; you gotta have somebody to be better than. There's no such thing as whiteness independent of somebody else to be nonwhite or an other.

The work for justice isn't charity work.

To what am I going to be loyal, and to what degree am I willing to suffer and sacrifice for that?

A lot of us are obedient to our egos. Every good thing I do has my ego in it, too. I have to constantly work on that, and pray and hope those good things are accepted from whatever good was in the intention.

There's no reason for us to constantly learn about each other from sources that don't have our cooperation in mind, that don't have our humanity in their focus. They're here to sell us stuff... We've got to get our ideas for ourselves and from each other.

We can't trust people whose goal is domination. We can't trust these people to inform us about each other. We have to learn about each other from each other.

We all have ways of understanding our spirituality, but if you get to the center of it, we're all unified...there's not a superiority in somebody's humanity of one person over another person.

Think about the way we're oriented, the way our minds are trained to think about things and about people.

We all have the chance to change the world for the better.

Joining a startup or starting a startup means that you choose life.

When people start to fight you, you've progressed pretty far because you are one step away from winning.

One of the greatest beauties of building a startup is that you're going to figure out who you are.

A startup is one of the best vessels and vehicles for rebellion.

There's a rebel against, 'It can't be done'.

Perfection is going to kill you.

Better a short no than a long maybe.

"Being busy... it takes us away from people that we love. It takes us away from our clients because we're reacting instead of being proactive. It doesn't allow us to step back and be visionaries. It doesn't allow us time to stop and think or plan or create strategies or to second guess what we're doing and think about it in a different way."

If you measure the wrong thing, you’ll get the wrong thing.

"Say no to the stuff you don't want to do anymore."

"Taking the risk of walking away from people we were badly with".

Say no to the stuff you don’t want to do anymore

Mantain a sense of wonder in adulthood

Why are we looking at natural systems? It's a very simple rationale - what ever took the longest to create, needs most attention.

The region of Bangalore is known for its lakes - folklore has it that were 1008 lakes, which are connected - they are not simply lakes that you count, but that form part of a specific system.

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns. – John Maurice Clark

Where does the art end? Where does the scientific experiment beginn?

Once you start measuring something it very quickly becomes all you see. What you measure defines what you value. If you look at any company look at what they measure and you can instantly tell the kind of culture they are.

What differentiates the people who succeed is that they're the ugly ducklings who dare to fly even though they know that people are going to laugh at them one way or another 'cause they know that they're going to grown up like a swan because they're going to learn from every laugh, every interaction with other people.

J’ai eu pas mal de soucis avec des chorégraphes qui me reprochaient souvent de ne pas me concentrer assez, mais moi dans ma tête, je me disais non, ce n’est pas de la concentration, c’est juste l’improvisation vs leur travail à eux : tout composer, tout mettre en place. Ça, ça a été pour moi les premiers clashs.

It's a matter of figuring out what they mean by the things that they say and really pursing down what are the essentials that they want from the work and what I can expand on into something else.

I use the city as a canvas to create events and situations that generate powerful experiences for people.

I'm an activist.

I'm rebelling against the idea of a city that is dull and grey. I'm rebelling against the idea of experiencing the city through the shut windows of a car stuck in traffic. I'm rebelling against the idea of just working every day just to pay my rent.

Content is the most important element of any publication.

I wanted to put the 'face' back into 'interface.'

Everything that we produce as digital designers, digital creators disappears into the ether that is the internet after a while.

The most logical or easy way to give my talk would be to talk about all my successes and inspire you with all this success, but I'm not going to do that. Here are the ten ways to fail as greatly as I did.

I never seem to choose the easiest or the most logical paths in life.

Not only that, but you have to tattoo on skin, which is not like paper, at all. It bleeds, it stretches, and it's attached to a person with opinions.

I never asked for any special treatment. I only wanted to do the work that I love to do and to let the work speak for itself.

It's not our bosses or our companies that define us, it's ourselves that limit how far we can go.

If only 12% of New Zealanders don't drink alcohol, you're definitely being a rebel by not drinking.

Being rebellious is being sober-minded, being engaged in society, and wanting to make a difference.

When these messages are taught to our young people day in, day out, it doesn't bode well for changing our society.

That can be a non violent act, and act of pure creation. An act of trying to do something meaningful.

Be clear on your purpose. What the hell are you doing? And why are you doing it?

You’re rebelling against something, but you’re also going to something.

Where is legit art criticism in Detroit?

La lucha no es contra los otros, si no es contra uno mismo.

I was able to make the ketchup and mustard work.

The most successful people in our business, by and large, are humble, accessible, and down to earth.

Do you know anyone whose opinion you trust, anyone who you consider a mentor, anyone you look up to as a role model, who is an asshole?

I constantly try to build on my process.

On my days off, I would go to New York and make appointments from phonebooths to show my portfolio.

At some point my parents decided to tell me that play time was over. That drawing thing was for children. In Nigeria, we were told to find a career.

As a graffiti artist you can't just paint in nice, open areas, you kind of got to go where the scum and the filth is.

That was my formation, just persistance in doing and doing something that you enjoy without any kind of vision of any profitable outcome of it.

I tried studying advertising and I failed miserably.

Back then the visual identity of a place was way more interesting than it is now, all the shops, all the signs were made by hand and somehow, whatever artist it is was, tried to reflect what that was about in his handcraft.

I don’t know why I had to set up a show in a gallery. I can post whatever I want online. I can just put something out, people can visit it, and take what they want from it.

One thing I’ve learned from my friends in the street art community is to always document your work. It’s such a temporary form of art.

I went there to study architecture [...] but I realized it wasn't really the buildings I was interested in; it was the space between the buildings—it was the people, it was the energy, it was all of the different layers that make a city tick.

Start a conversation with yourself about what the future looks like for you.

We're consistently putting the screen in the way of where human interaction should be.

All of us have this great power and opportunity, yet not many of us seem to be that content with our lives.

What are you actually going to do with the power that has been given to you?

They are willing to be entertained. They are willing to be engaged. You just have to find where that communication can happen.

The best way for a troublemaker, or creative person, to survive and thrive in a career that you love is to focus on doing your best work and learning something new every single day.

What you learned in school is how to think. What you learn on the job is how to think in a way that makes you valuable to your employer.

It takes fifteen years to have fifteen years of experience.

Competence comes with experience.

Dominators, one of the things they really love to do is make us think that everything in our life is an isolated incident.

Nothing will make you more aware of how deceitful the media is than being covered by the media.

The Muslims say that the human being is an obedient creature, and the question is to what am I going to be obedient? And to what degree am I willing to sacrifice for that obedience? A lot of us are obedient to our egos.

What's a riot to one person is an uprising to another.

You can teach collaboration, but you can't teach rebellious behavior.

How to you balance authenticity with irony?

It's never been easier to stand out in the clutter because there is so much clutter. Being thoughtfully rebellious, allows us to apply our messages and designs and photography in ways that we can find unique things and unique messages.

There's a pretty good chance that you paid for parking, that you drove down here, you got in this seat, and I'm going to ruin your career.

We're taught indoctrinated with this way of thinking before we're even of an age to make decisions about what kind of people we want to be.

To me, the realest rebels are actually very obedient. We're very loyal. We're obedient to something that is unpopular.

Us people in the creative class are extremely self-destructive.

Creative people have a very low pain tolerance. We get sick of people telling us the way to do things and how things should be done, so we find our own way.

I'm going to ruin your careers if you listen to what I'm talking about today.

The rebel almost always dies.

If not now, then when?

Everyone has someone in their life who struggles with addiction.

You have to be able to break through the clutter.

People listen to rockstars in a way that they don't listen to public health officials, they don't listen to their mothers.

This year alone we're going to raise about $42 million dollars for AIDS.. by selling lipstick.

We would rather have you live with a drug problem and live with AIDS than die.

People don't buy things they don't want—even if it's for a good cause.

The sign of a creative, great person is that they don't feel sorry for themselves.

You have to be comfortable existing in states where you don't know things.

There's a small percentage of people that have a lot of luck paired with talent, but for most of us it's about doing a lot of work.

We can learn a lot about our own personal crafts but we don't have to be directly connected to them, we can just be inspired by them.

The last buggy whip factory was no doubt a model of efficiency.... There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

We need to have a discussion about how effective we are, not how efficient we are.

What you value is intrinsically tied to what you sell. It shapes you, it shapes your culture and it creates the wrong incentives when you sell time.

The majority of what we manage in our lives has no way to be measured. The love of a spouse or children. The trust we have in coworkers. You can't measure it.

The history of the billable hour is a confluence of events that span over 60 years.

They don't understand why they're doing it, because as far as they know, this is the way it's always been done. And that is why we do timesheets.

Arts and sciences were once united. Let's reunite them.

For me, rebel means art and science.

Food is an easier way to approach culture.

We discovered that by using food, people were much more likely to engage with us in a dialogue.

You are what you create.

Conceptualize, design, produce. Repeat.

Break the rules. Burn down walls. Combine. Freely associate.

This is the difference between rebellion and dissent. If you want to repackage an ideology to sell it to the mainstream, your process invariably involves that mainstream helping to shape your sales pitch.

I think there is value in blurring the line between alternative and mainstream.

It doesn't serve us, or anyone, to pretend that money is not important. It doesn't serve activism, it doesn't serve creativity, it doesn't serve social movements like feminism.

Our bar for selling out was pretty low. If selling out was going to be defined by simply engaging with the mainstream, then we were already losing because that was exactly what we wanted to do.

We wanted to take the formal conventions of a magazine and use it in the service of something that was on the fringe—feminism.

From an economic perspective, you can position yourself as an alternative, but if you're still dependent on the traditional revenue streams—that's going to complicate your ability to be truly alternative.

What happens when you don't conform? What happens when you encourage teen girls to embrace their differences?

I describe myself as a pop-culture-holic.

A rebel goes against convention. Creativity does, too.

It pays to rise against convention.

It pays to have a side gig. It's a part of being a rebel.

Startups don't die because they run out of money, they die because they don't figure out who they are.