There's an argument on HN and other techie circles I see which is pretty insidious and it goes like this:
"There is very little meaningful content being exchanged between artists / fashion people / etc.
The successful people in these fields are the ones that are good at personal branding + PR. They don't have any significant skill or insight over everyone else."
Do you really think it's likely that millions of highly educated people are just exchanging noise and there is really no signal underneath it?
What many people miss is that there is a legitimate conversation happening in fashion, or modern art. It's just over your head, you don't understand it, so you dismiss it as nonsense.
And yeah, luck and personal branding are PART of success, like everywhere. But these fields also filter out most of the people who are not intrinsically excellent, in addition to being good at branding.
Did you read today's Lunch with the FT? It's between Jo Ellison and Victoria Beckham. There's an interesting conversation in the paper on Victoria's fashion design career, and the problems she's faced along the way with branding and investment, yet she's pushing.
"There is very little meaningful content being exchanged between artists / fashion people / etc.
The successful people in these fields are the ones that are good at personal branding + PR. They don't have any significant skill or insight over everyone else."
For example, from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409610
Do you really think it's likely that millions of highly educated people are just exchanging noise and there is really no signal underneath it?
What many people miss is that there is a legitimate conversation happening in fashion, or modern art. It's just over your head, you don't understand it, so you dismiss it as nonsense.
And yeah, luck and personal branding are PART of success, like everywhere. But these fields also filter out most of the people who are not intrinsically excellent, in addition to being good at branding.