If you listen to Virgil's talk at Harvard, you hear "The Stream". The subtlety of his words, his free-flowing nature, and ability go entirely no script with such cohesive language and naming tension.
These are moments where I think he hits on the coming "stream".
@5:10 "let's see how many messages come through on the wave"
@5:27 "share random things on my laptop"
@5:38 "perpetual kid at school"
@6:00 "all these sort of short cuts"
@7:01 "flip through and showcase the things Instagram doesn't have the capability to show"
His slides are even minimal, to active the stream. His stream. Allowing the activation to bring forward visual images in his head, I imagine, that's kinda what I see and feel when activating my own stream
But the thing I wanted to get at most is this one line by Virgil, @8:43.
I basically work at a feverish pace in a self-serving way just to find my signature. What's my DNA?
I think this line holds the clues towards.
How to tap into your stream, feverishly working.
How to be your authentic self, self-serving.
How to find your niche, signature / DNA.
Today I'm only going to address 1.
The Stream.
Something I touch on in this cast via Warpcast.
And how it requires this feverish pace to tap into creative sprints, intersecting so many different lines of thinking, the thing you produce in mind is normally ahead of it's time.
You'll need to have a certain level trust in your own authenticity and credibility in your niche to believe it for yourself, but removing those two obstacles. Trust me, the stream produces raw value, holding water, especially if most other people don't see it.
The stream is information, the more you move through, in clear states of flow, the more you can pick and choose what you carry forward with you to the next creative act. For me, I write and cast to be "in stream". When I'm flowing hard, I start to dance. Music plays a part too.
If you don't know Virgil was a DJ, I now understand why, and how much this played into his creative process. He had a DJ set brought into his creative room when hired as Creative Director for LV.
But few people can do this. It's like electricity flowing through the body. Hence his words, "feverish". And I'll admit, it's been an amazing "privilege" to have had experienced this.
Virgil was the first person to put language to something I never understood about my own brain. I need more information, not less. Feverishly working through it all, and only when I have enough can I go into "Deep Work" sprints away from everything.
Using all that information up, like water in a glass, then refilling as necessary. After a certain point in time this feedback loop stretches to longer time intervals. Iterations can be accelerated but continously pushing on the stream(s).
Virgil taught me his version of the Stream in this one talk, that honestly changed a lot of my thinking. Hence this slide.
I've read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and it all made sense to me but I could never do it the way it was described in this book.
This led me to think that the stream can be experienced in bi-modal states.
Precise or accurate.
Where maybe precise is the creation act of signature.
Precise is a very very narrow tunnel where you are flying headfirst and you can only see a thin strip in front of your retna, a thin red beam, printing your signature to material.
Where maybe accuracy is the creative act of authenticity.
Accurate is a inside the tunnel, sitting in a chair with everything passing you around and you are grabbing items as your authentic self desires.
And before you have a signature you must be true to your authenticate self. It all starts with you holding onto your Stream. It's a privilege you don't want to miss. Work feverishly through it.
tl:dr: a stream is about tapping into flow states in a future where information is coming at us through all sides -- focusing on pragmatism, design, and self to be creative and create.
This has also been written about in books like Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience .
add the chatGPT of what I say about things relating to him
If you want to explore Virgil Abloh through my stream here are somethings you can do.
check out Searchcaster.xyz and look at all things I've posted of him.
go to this ChatGPT bot that has all the things I have ever written privately about him.
etc...
pull in the 2 streams I talk about before.
