zaidd'or

A few months ago I received an email from a friend of mine telling me to read a book called “Unlabeled” by Marc Ecko. For who may not know him he is the head fashion designer of Ecko. You know that skating brand with the rhino? Well thats him! He started off with spray painting on t-shirts his own graffiti. With a $5,000 initial investment it turned into a billion dollar brand. In his book he wrote the obstacles he faced and the turbulences they went through. There are a few things that stuck with me that I definitely had to share with you.

• Consciousness is underrated. Entrepreneurs can be so focused on the blinking lights of tomorrow land that they overlook the reality of today.

 

• Sometimes I am doubtful and question myself as an artist, and say ‘at least I am an entrepreneur!’ Pssstt. ‘Entrepreneur’? Being an entrepreneur alone will not satisfy this mandate to create. The word sucks, like I joked earlier. I do really disdain the word. It has a passive, checking-of-the-boxes connotation, and it comes from the French word ‘entreprendre,’ which means to ‘undertake’.

 

• What makes you a good artist is what will make you a good entrepreneur. If you’re authentic in the one, you’ll be authentic in the other.

 

• Never feel bad about successfully selling your creations.

Never feel bad about creating art you can’t sell.

Just create.

 

• Brands are not built upon finite numbers, but rather a curve composed of points along the axis of time and actions. The forces of life are always changing. But somehow we seek the validation that can only be found quantitatively in absolute numbers.