As has been a tradition for the last three years, on New Year’s Eve I write a post about some of the books that kept me company in the previous year.

Every eligible person in the kingdom hoped to be picked by Prince Charming. No one knew what Prince Charming’s selection criteria were as he went from door to door. The criterion was arbitrary – shoe size. And, somehow, Prince Charming managed to skip all those hundreds of houses where he could have found several perfectly […]

Exclusivity: The bravery to choose to speak to the sensibilities of only a few instead of all. We live in the world of niche. There is a magazine dedicated to water! A blog dedicated to growing succulents! A magazine on raising… emus! And one about miniature donkeys. Something exclusive is not exclusionary. It is razor-sharp […]

Even if your business is not a white-glove type of brand, you still need to define what “Luxury” means to you. In fact even more so. Because when you remove the simplicity of exchanging a product with a large lump of money, then you have to exchange a product with a good story.

In 1948 John Cage conceived a composition that consisted of nothing else but 4’ and 33” of silence, or more precisely, the absence of intended sounds, and only ambient sound.  Execution-wise, it could have been performed by untrained musicians. Innovation-wise, silence is hardly new. There is silence before every concert – all that Cage did […]

Industry means depersonalising and replacing human agency with processes, policies, efficiency and replication. This is the definition of industry.  The wedding “industry” occasionally focuses more on the industry part, not the wedding part. I have been lucky this year to have worked only with creatives who focus on the wedding part. This is the people […]

Would you tip the same if the tip-jar was hidden from anyone’s view?Maybe you would. But most people wouldn’t. Because, like walkathons, bikeathons, or fun runs, tipping is not just about the money, but about how it makes us feel. It is about the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And it all comes down […]

The answer has little to do with whether people are paying you for what you do. I think the most appreciable distinction between a true professional and an amateur is this:A professional is presenting a self (consistently and deliberately), while an amateur is revealing the self they feel like being in the moment. Imagine the […]

Who is to blame? Your value system? Your time-management skills? The system (“I am in wrong field/ country/ team”)? You will never know the answer with certainty. You can guess, but the true answer will always remain outside anyone’s conceptual structure. The easiest thing to do would be to blame the system. Once you go […]

Tragedy is not the same as hell. Tragedy is in the core of life itself (by design of the cycle of life). Hell, though, is misunderstanding this very reality of life as the world being against us. Self-imposed misery is what hell is. The world is not against us. The world is chaos. Let’s accept […]

Being “safe” (in business, art, life) is an illusion. One cannot possibly expect to be safe. The only thing one can expect from oneselves is to be metasafe. Metasafe: to be able to cope with danger/ failure/ death/ _________ (all the nasty stuff the world will inevitably throw).  Once metasafe, it no longer makes sense […]

– Copy someone you admire.– But won’t this make me inauthentic? Before you can compose/draw/photograph a masterpiece, something that is beyond any previous memory, you have to first instil skill. Skill comes from grinding repetition and copying (or, better, imitation of) the masters until your brain forms new pathways. Why can’t we accept that Life, […]

Let people outshine you. Even better, enable them. Because then, you can observe and improve yourself. Let’s forgo the pleasure of complaining how stupid/ uncultivated/ unprofessional everybody else is. Whether this be true or not, aside from the temporary gratification of feeling the smartest person in the room, the reality is this: Being the “smartest […]

I believe responsibility starts with taking care of ourselves. In a nutshell: “taking care of ourselves today, in a way that will allow us to take care for ourselves in the future too.”(Such as, if I were to betray my friends today, it ‘d be left lonely tomorrow.) Yet, it’s not about consequences. It’s about […]

The Prevailing Wisdom is “Don’t fly too high.” Only now, in this new economy of meaning, do we realise that comfort is the real enemy.

I always advise photographers to get their hands on a film camera. Shoot in parallel with digital. If you are looking to start photographing film, here are some of my recommended cameras.

On one hand there are those clients who want you to do the standard. On the other side of the spectrum there are the clients who challenge you to do better work, are proud they hired you and they trust you enough to allow you the benefit to disagree with them. How do we get less of the first and more of the second?

We “take” a photograph. We “snap” it. We “shoot” it. Whatever the case, we seem to hunt for it, because, all of the above are nothing but hunting terms.

If you have been considering re-designing your new website then this post is just for you! I’d want to walk you through everything that went through my mind when creating my new website, in the hopes that it will be useful to you on your own path.

I strongly believe in generosity as the cornerstone of being of service. Generosity is one of those transactions that can be easily misunderstood. Generosity is not offering things cheaper. This is not the kind of generosity I am talking about. Generosity is a the act of giving a finite resource you possess to someone else without expecting anything in return. With no agenda, except to delight and offer a better alternative.

Comfortable is not the same as “safe”. Because someone more hungry, and more visionary, will sooner or later show up. Jeff Koons, whose exhibition was in Florence at the same time we were, reinvents himself every few years. (Sure, his balloon animals remain his trademark, but they simply fund his constant transformations).