I was deeply moved by this image:
Dragon spacecraft – as seen from the International Space Station.
In a week bombarded by much ado about nothing, it’s uplifting to know extremely talented people are still doing things, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”.
I’m optimistic again. This orphan of Apollo, definitely wants his future back.
I blocked out a Sunday afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed “reading” Stefan Sagmeister‘s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. Maxims are as follows:
Every seven years Sagmeister shuts down his studio and goes on a year-long sabbatical (no client work). I’m fascinated by that – probably because I lack the courage to try it myself.
I’ve been reading a lot of Andy Grove lately. This quote, from an older Esquire interview, is particularly prophetic:
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.
Satisfying a customer should always be the primary goal of a business. It genuinely saddens me to learn of companies spending more time thinking about what they, rather than you, can do with your data.
Trust: So hard to build, yet so easy to destroy.
My apologies for not sharing any books these past few months. I’ve been reading on a Kindle. And Amazon, it seems, doesn’t agree that second hand books are worth handing down to the digital age.
There is a tip I’d like to share. Something that has worked very well for me is to identify a writer I love. Read everything they have written. Read what they read. And continue ad infinitum.
For the last five years I’ve pretty much exclusively read fiction. Dostoyevsky to Kafta to Kundera to Cervantas and now Vargas Llosa. But I could not resist reading Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs (I highly recommend it!).
Since then I continued with Einstein. And currently Benjamin Franklin. But back to the first two…
Einstein and Jobs are connected in more ways than dying and being born (respectively) in the same year. I’ve wanted to write about my favorite connection for some time. Since today is the last day of 2011, it probably explains my sense of urgency.
I remember watching Jonathan Ive’s speech at “Celebrating Steve” and being moved to tears by what he said:
Now while hopefully the work appeared inevitable. Appeared simple, and easy, it really cost. It cost us all, didn’t it?
But you know what? It cost him most. He cared the most. He worried the most deeply. He constantly questioned, ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’
And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never presumed, he never assumed, that we would get there in the end. And when the ideas didn’t come, and when the prototypes failed, it was with great intent, with faith, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great.
But it wasn’t until Einstein’s biography that I started thinking about caring in the large scope of life. Physicist Lee Smolin described Einstein as, “a gardener weeding a flower bed.” He wrote:
I believe what allowed Einstein to achieve so much was primarily a moral quality. He simply cared far more than most of his colleagues that the laws of physics have to explain everything in nature coherently and consistently.
Care about what you do. Sweat the small stuff. Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They are the product”. I believe this to my core. My New Year’s Resolution is simple: To care even more.
Happy New Year!
“I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.”
—Cus D’amato, legendary boxing trainer
I find it hard to believe I have never seen these 46 seconds before:
“When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” – Steve Jobs
So true.
(found via http://www.brainpickings.org)
“Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
“It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry — French Aviator
I stumbled upon this letter a few moments ago. Pixar animator Austin Madison hand-wrote it for “aspiring artists” … I would say for aspiring creatives in any field.
(images courtesy of Willie Downs’ Animator Letters Project)
Transcript
PIXAR
May 17, 2011
To Whom it May Inspire,
I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, “in the zone” seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time.
The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems.
In a word: PERSIST.
PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision. Remember what Peter Jackson said, “Pain is temporary. Film is forever.” And he of all people should know.
So next time you hit writer’s block, or your computer crashes and you lose an entire night’s work because you didn’t hit save (always hit save), just remember: you’re never far from that next burst of divine creativity. Work through that 97% of murky abyssmal mediocrity to get to that 3% which everyone will remember you for!
I guarantee you, the art will be well worth the work!
Your friend and mine,
Austin Madison
“ADVENTURE IS OUT THERE!”
Today we pulled the wraps off my company’s fourth product shiftd.com: A web service to bookmark, share, and discover videos worth watching.
We’re only in prototype form now. So for those that enjoy playing an active part of an ever evolving creation, please sign up and let me know what you think! I’m really looking forward to receiving your video recommendations (@mosko) and sharing some of my own favorites with you.
Here’s one to get started:
We’ll be on Facebook, Twitter, and (of course) Shiftd if you want to stay posted.
Enjoy.
