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" The value of story—of creator reputation—was vividly demon- strated in a social experiment conducted by the street artist Banksy during a 2013 New York residency. This is an artist whose work has sold for as much as $1.87 million at auction. Banksy erected a street stall on a sidewalk bordering Central Park and had a vendor sell his prints for sixty dollars each. He then posted a video of his experi- ment. Footage from a hidden camera captures some of his most iconic images displayed on a table. Tourists and locals meander by. His first sale doesn’t come for hours. A woman buys two small works for her children, negotiating a fifty percent discount. Around four in the afternoon, a woman from New Zealand buys two more. A little over an hour later, a Chicago man who “just needs something for the walls,” buys four. With each sale, the vendor gives the buyer a hug or kiss. At 6 p.m., he closes the stall, having made $420. In June 2015, one of these stenciled prints, Love Is in the Air—an image of a masked protestor throwing a bouquet of flowers—sold for $249,000. How much of the value of Banksy’s art is tied up in his name, his global brand? "
― Alan Philips, , The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential
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" When artists start out, no one knows who they are or what they do. Despite this, they start manifesting their vision. A painter begins painting and sharing those paintings with the market. Maybe she sells a cou- ple at a low price, or maybe she can’t sell any. So what does she do? Somehow she begins to share the story behind her art. Why does she paint? Where did she come from? What’s her inspiration? What’s the meaning behind her work? Why does she need—not want, need—to paint? And over time people hear her story: some connect with it and others don’t, but the ones who do connect, who see a reflection of themselves in her story, become her tribe. Maybe eventually she gets a gallerist, manager, patron, or publicist, and they share her resonant story with even more people, growing her tribe. Then what happens? Though the paintings are the same, by combining the work with an authentic, resonant story, our painter magically creates value and demand for her art grows. "
― , The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential
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" He (Maslow) believed every human has a powerful desire to realize his or her full potential. Maslow’s term for reaching that goal was self-ac- tualization, which he understood as “expressing one’s creativity, quest for spiritual enlightenment, pursuit of knowledge, and the desire to give to society” within daily life. If an individual is able to self-actualize, they become capable of having “peak experiences,” which he defined as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter. "
― , The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential
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" Freed from incessant worry about securing the bare essentials to live, the majority of us in the Western world are able to focus on tending to our higher needs—on pursuing happiness, on thriving. And one group has benefited from this shift more than all the rest—millennials, the largest, most diverse generation ever.
Millennials, those Americans born between 1980 and the early 2000s, spent their youth in relatively comfortable surroundings. They watched as their parents—the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers—obeyed the rules of the industrial complex, getting steady corporate jobs and saving for retirement. Their parents achieved modern society’s definition of success: material wealth. But millennials could see that, rather than bringing fulfillment, this path often ended with their parents unhappy, divorced, stressed-out, or on antidepressants. In response to this, millennials went in another direction. Well-educated and communicative, they learned from their parents’ experiences and adjusted their needs hierarchy to put meaning ahead of money.
Millennials want lives marked by creativity, spiritual satisfaction, expanded knowledge, societal contribution, and multilayered experiences. Sound familiar? We’re in Maslow territory—millennials are seeking to live self-actualized lives and enjoy peak experiences, a generational change that has had extensive repercussions. "
― , The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential