Rochelle King: Your Biggest Rival is Your Best Asset

In our jobs, family life, and social circles, conflict is difficult to manage. In this 99U Talk, Spotify's Global VP of Design Director Rochelle King reminds us that tension is essential in any creative endeavor. Instead of running from confrontation King says, "the biggest thing that I've learned about dealing with conflict is that it's fundamentally about the mindset. Explicitly embracing conflict actually allowed me to take control of it."

How Arts and Culture Add to City Economies

From The Atlantic City Lab: 

A new study published in Economic Development Quarterly finds that the arts do in fact add to urban economies overall. To get at this, the authors—the noted urban real estate specialist Arthur Nelson and several colleagues—employ a unique data set on professional performing arts organizations (which I have lightheartedly referred to as the “SOBs” of the symphony, opera, and ballet) with annual budgets of over $2 million.

Using this data, the study looks at the change in knowledge-class workers (defined similarly to the creative class) between 2000 and 2010 for some 350 U.S. metro areas. Its statistical analysis controls for a wide variety of other factors that might be thought to affect the growth in knowledge or creative class employment, including overall employment change, population, density, housing values, the share of college grads, race, the share of the population that is foreign-born, and natural amenities like climate and terrain, among others.

The study finds substantial evidence that performing arts organizations add to both the growth of the knowledge class and to urban economies broadly. Those with just one type of performing arts center saw a 1.1 percent increase in knowledge-class employment between 2000 and 2010; those with two types of performing arts centers saw a 1.5 percent increase; and those with all three types saw a 2.2 percent increase. The study notes that, while this may seem like modest growth, the numbers add up. Over this ten-year period, the 118 metros with at least one performing arts organization generated a whopping $60 billion in annual income and more than half a million additional knowledge-class jobs, or over 12 percent of all knowledge-class jobs created over that time frame.

Why Work Is so Much Easier than Love

The Book of Life, from A School of Life begins an essay on work and love this way: 

We’re a culture that’s highly attuned to what’s beautiful and moving about love; we know its high points and celebrate its ecstasies in films and songs. By comparison, work is the dull, tedious bit – the thing we have to do to pay the bills. And yet what’s striking is how often work, despite its lack of glamour, in fact turns out to be the easier, more enjoyable and ultimately more humane part of life.

Learning to Deal With the Impostor Syndrome

Carl Richards in The New York Times: 

Two American psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, gave it a name in 1978: the impostor syndrome. They described it as a feeling of “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” While these people “are highly motivated to achieve,” they also “live in fear of being ‘found out’ or exposed as frauds.” Sound familiar?

Once we know what to call this fear, the second step that I’ve found really valuable is knowing we’re not alone. Once I learned this thing had a name, I was curious to learn who else suffered from it. One of my favorite discoveries involved the amazing American author and poet Maya Angelou. She shared that, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock—a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas.

The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems.