I’m a little embarrassed about this because it’s so wordy and the audio’s clipping, but there’s some good stuff in here about how I think about design, doing work, and what I was like in high school (such a great question). My thanks to Omar for the conversation.
Books do not start movements; movements start books.”
For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
Be this guy. Via Danforth.
I began to drink heavily after I’d realised that the things I’d most wanted in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen.”
He really feels about partying the way that a Japanese calligrapher feels about lettering: that it is a human manifestation of the divine, a metaphor for the fulfillingness of life.”
If you’re talentless or lazy, none of this will work. If you’re talentless and lazy, you’re particularly out of luck.
[…} Mostly, you just need to care, and try. You need to make something, and then make it again, a little better. You need to look around for money. You need to reach your hand out to meet someone when it would be easier to keep to yourself. You need to make something for you when it would be easier just do what someone else tells you to. All of these things are hard, but none of them require anything more than gumption. Which I bet you have.”
It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. ”
What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously – but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.”
There is a secular trend going on, in which launching a start-up is a more common thing to do. It used to be there were two things you could do after college: go to grad school or get a job. Soon, I think there will be three things: go to grad school, get a job, or start your own company. I suspect this will be one of these economic transformations on the scale of the industrial revolution.”
It was very hard to choose which quote I wanted to highlight from this article. It is a very good article.
Here’s a couple more I couldn’t resist:
The way [startups] die is they run out of money. So what could cause them to run out of money? They can either not make something people want or they can be bad at selling it. Sometimes, they’re just bad at selling. But most of the time, start-ups fail for the same reasons restaurants do: Their food is bad.
I think people underestimate how small big ideas were when they first got started. Microsoft’s first product was an implementation of the BASIC programming language for a machine called Altair. There were probably a few thousand users, total. If those guys had presented that idea on Demo Day, investors would have laughed at them. But it turns out, everything has some adjacent territory, if you’re energetic enough. It’s OK to start out with a small idea. People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them.
The very best ideas usually seem like bad ideas at first. Google seemed like a bad idea. There were already several other search engines, some of which were operated by public companies. Who needed another? And Facebook? When I first heard about Facebook, it was for college students, who don’t have any money. And what do they do there? Waste time looking at one another’s profiles. That seemed like the stupidest company ever. I’m glad no one gave me an opportunity to turn it down.