Bradley's Website

Isn’t it curious how a “personal favorites” list is a distinctly different list from a “greatest of all time” list?

In hip-hop or basketball, for instance, there is only a small handful of people who can be placed in the G.O.A.T. list if you expect to be taken seriously. For hip-hop, it’s Pac, Biggie, Jay-Z, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Andre 3K, and a few others. For basketball, it’s Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant, etc… These individuals have a claim to throne, but not necessarily your heart. In a personal favorites list, we are willing to sacrifice a little bit of objective greatness for personal attachment.

Indeed— this bifurcation exists in just about every sector of culture. The Iron Giant is one of my all-time favorite films, but it will never be put next to Space Odyssey or Psycho in a New York Times list. The book Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card taught me some of the most foundational lessons of my childhood, but it cannot be seriously compared to Ulysses in terms of literature.

When you and a piece—or person—of culture intersect with perfect timing, it produces an effect that simply cannot be counterfeited. These are the artifacts, voices, and ideas that go into the soil of your imagination and feed the brightest flowers of your thinking. When I write about tech, for instance, I may not consciously be thinking about Hogarth Hughes, but part of me is always looking to reproduce his posture of unflinching hopefulness and redemptive gaze towards tech, in both the reader and myself.

I recall Scott Galloway talking some time ago about the need to develop a “kitchen cabinet” of perspectives you can channel whenever you analyze a problem, and I think this is related. Each of us are a constellation of personalities and we have generations of ancestral wisdom to thank for the knowledge we consume so liberally. But acknowledging those fingerprints which leave unique marks on our soul and taking time to trace the contours is an especially fruitful endeavor. It can reveal a lot about yourself and unlock a new way to make judgments. I highly recommend developing one.

My Mt. Rushmore, or kitchen cabinet, is as follows:

• Soren Kierkegaard
• Marshall Mcluhan
• Simone Weil
• Kendrick Lamar
• Peter Drucker

It’s a strange assortment, although I see a few common threads through each of them. Again, this is not my “greatest of all time” list, just the dead people I find myself talking to the most and who, through sheer unforced curiosity, I have read or listened to obsessively. These can’t be consciously selected really, just stumbled upon and accidentally internalized. I am sure it will be different in a few years, like it was a different a few years ago. There’s no pressure to this—it’s for no one but yourself. So, who’s in yours?