NICHOLAS KORN

TV shows often mention how many houses celebrities and the really rich own. As if having lots of places to live is an enviable goal. I’ve come to think that the opposite is true. It’s not having many locations for living, but really creating and defining the place where you live and work that makes our days and weeks feel like they matter.

I ran a theater company ages ago, and during first year after our third show, the company finally had enough of a bank account to get our own rehearsal studio. I went out to Goodwill and bought a couple of couches, coffee tables and end tables, and got a refrigerator and other appliances from the hardware megastore. 

The studio was in an down-and-out part of town, and the space was rough, but it was open, and the rehearsal area, the lounging area and the workspace for building sets were all on different sides of this one huge room. It created an atmosphere for creating and connecting.

I look back now, and I think getting that space together for the 4 years I produced was one of the best and coolest things I’ve done. 

So, it’s not the grandeur of property that counts so much, as the sense of defining your space, and making it an extension, expression and an advancement of who you are.

And that applies whether it’s your home, your studio or your position in the market or even society.

No one can tell you what that is, and that’s the point. It’s our opportunity (and our privilege) to define and deliver that space to the world.

I love what our new technology can do, but get repeatedly disappointed by what we are doing with it. Now that we have such elegant and far-reaching means at our fingertips, it seems that posting pictures of the food we cooked that day, or other fleeting personal trivia, is the best we can think of.

In the antique times of the 1960’s and 70’s, it was a common joke that someone would get invited to dinner at home of friend or boss, and after the meal be forced to watch a slide show of the host’s trip to the Grand Canyon or vacation at the lake.

The epitome of someone else boring you with their personal stuff while they had you as a captive audience.

Fortunately, the social media allows us to zip past the uninteresting stuff with the roll of a mouse wheel. But the Grand Canyon syndrome is still in full effect – the great divide between our personal scrapbooks and what really might be worth another’s time to read and consider.

Of course, that’s just me talking.

More at: http://www.nicholaskorn.com

The internet isn’t really build for the long format. Or maybe it’s changing us so that we aren’t built for it. The average attention span for a YouTube video is about 45 seconds. After that, you get clicked. 

And we thought the TV remote was the killer app. Still, with our accelerating appetite for accelerated content, we can see why the feature-length movies, and even half-hour television programs are watching their audiences recede.

I imagine in ten years, the Academy Awards won’t matter. Who will watch those movies? Film may become an old media, like theater. Kids in High School no longer need to put on plays. They now have all the gear and apps they need to make a pretty slick little movie.

As for the entertainment of the future, it may just have us all watching each other’s cats on video doing mildly amusing things. 

Me – I might finally get around to reading Paradise Lost. 

More at: http://www.nicholaskorn.com

I don’t wait for inspiration. Most people delay starting their creative process until the right idea hits them. And it almost never does. Or they’re never sure if the idea is really the right one.

All of that is wasteful and confusing and wrong. For me, inspiration is what happens after I’ve started diving into a project. It comes on the other side of the initial effort, not before.

That’s why I never wait for inspiration – because I know that it’s really inspiration that is waiting for me.

More at: http://www.nicholaskorn.com

Any attempt to reach perfection will fail. Instead, only the effort that focuses on the excellent qualities that lie within the work at hand will bring it closer to perfection. That’s because perfection isn’t something you can give to your work, it is something the work gives to you.

More at http://www.nicholaskorn.com