Life lessons: Invest like Peggy Guggenheim
She called herself the poor Guggenheim. But that was only true because her cousins inherited more than she did. She’d get revenge.
Become a pinstripe poet
Life lessons: Love like Frank O’Hara
“Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal…” If O’Hara was poking fun, it came from a place of love.
Life lessons: Pop like Andy Warhol
Anyone can be famous for 15 minutes. That’s the promise in Andy Warhol’s paintings, films and books. He became a celebrity. You can too.
Life lessons: Pour emotion like Don Norman
Like William Morris before him, Don Norman is a designer who prizes both beauty and practicality. It’s a stance writers can learn from.
Life lessons: Tune in like Tolkien
Is rock the same as stone? Which is jagged? Which is round? You can guess because of your natural feeling for sound and meaning. Tolkien had that sensitivity to an almost superhuman degree.
Life lessons: Do business like Christo
Christo put ordinary objects on display as if they were sculptures. By the end of his life, he was presenting whole buildings as artworks, including the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He took over the world.
Life lessons: Approach AI like Cobain
To find a way forward, we have to look back. Hop into my time machine to survey the systems used by artists like Bowie and Cobain.
Life lessons: Get inspired like Patti Smith
There’s an abundance of wonders in the world. The egg you ate at breakfast could spark a story of obsessive love and betrayal. Just ask Patti Smith.
Life lessons: Keep going like Hemingway
Hemingway wrote with a pencil in one hand and a drink in the other. And the booze didn’t seem to slow him down. But what was his accelerant? What kept that pencil moving?
