Culture

From its historic neighborhoods to its trendy bars and restaurants, there is always something new and exciting to discover in Lisbon.

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.

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 […]

Our ethical responsibility is to recognise we have a light to bring into the world and that if we choose not to, the world will be dimmer because of it. Our greatest adventure in life is to lift the maximum load of responsibility we can conceivably bear in order to make the world a brighter […]

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 […]

Self-esteem is a myth. Don’t overestimate yourself but don’t underestimate who you can be. So, the question is:If you could be anyone, how would that person be like?

Define love:Love is hoping for the best of things despite their inadequacy or even malevolence. “Hoping”…”despite”: Hoping: Because if we are able to adopt a courageous attitude in a way that expects the best for all life, then we are enabling a collective metamorphosis towards betterment. Despite: Because everything and everyone will inevitably somehow fall […]

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 […]

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?

In a world of black headphones, why did Apple decide to go with white? And what can this teach us in the wedding industry? This episode is about social epidemics – or, why some services manage to spread where others don’t.

Good Marketing helps others become who they seek to become by giving them a place to belong in. Marketing, since its inception, has been making great use of status, which is humans’ constant effort to move up and down the ladder. And there are essentially two fundamentally different ways to do this. The first is by tapping on people’s need to dominate: to be smarter, prettier, more powerful. The second is by giving people a place to belong. Which one will you choose?

“Being authentic” is one of the most used phrases when it comes to branding. But what is “authenticity”? If authenticity is “the revealing of one’s true self” then, then, perhaps a better question would be 1. Is there ever a true self?; and 2. Do people even want to see it?

Originality sounds like a noble pursuit because all great thinkers appear to have been original. But is that true at all? If more of us acknowledged that originality is a flawed and over-glorified concept, the more we would feel safe to create. Our job, our mission, is to improve the familiar.