“I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn’t the life they were designed for.”
Unreal. Adieu by Alfred Guillou (1844-1926). Via danforth. Seriously. Wow.
I have a shot of espresso every afternoon. I love it. I’ve learned a lot about tasting and noticing flavors. Woodsy, dirty, sweet, astringent, blueberry, raspberry, tart, caramel, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, hazelnut, etc.
When you get good at something you can get snobbish. It’s your right. But with espresso I’m surprised how wide the range of “good” is, and how I’m pleased as punch with anything within that range.
I feel the same about design and, in many ways, business in general. There’s a wide range of good. There’s an hundred possible potential good outcomes for my design of Think Traffic or for the eventual offering of Fizzle.
Make sure you know what good is… for you, your business, your people. Do the work to know what success looks like, what the desired outcome actually is, what makes it balanced, not too acidic, not too boring.
Then, don’t waste a bunch of energy and effort splitting hairs that may not matter. Bring out the flavor of the bean and let it be.
“Never work for a bad client in your life. Because from a bad client, you will get a worse client thereafter. If you get a good client to begin, you will get a better client thereafter. It is better to starve than get a bad client, because from a bad client you just go down.
Don’t work for money, because it’s the lousiest profession in the world to make money… You do design because you feel it inside; you have a moral issue to spread quality in our environment.”
“The frightening and most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, really; and especially you don’t have any idea about where they’re going to come from tomorrow.”
Hal Riney in Art & Copy
“With success comes a level of sadness. You think, ‘I’ll reach this goal, and then I’ll feel a sense of completeness, of wholeness. I’ll feel that I have accomplished something. I will see myself as a worthy man.’ And it doesn’t really exist.”
Pete Campbell via Marlon
“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm. In the real world all rests on perseverance.”
The universe is a vast and uncaring place.
There is no right or wrong, morality is a human construct. Nothing we do will have any significance beyond our tiny, worthless, unimportant sphere of influence.
Yet here I am, waiting in line to order a veggie sandwich with locally grown ingredients, and holding in a fart.”
In this Ted talk Andrew Stanton, screenwriter at Pixar, gives us the building blocks of story. He doesn’t lay out these thoughts in a list, but it kind of makes sense to display these elements that way.