“From my experience, you can’t wait around to find what you love. You gotta work your ass off. And then you find what you love by doing piles and piles of work.”
- Kate Bingaman Burt
Kate Bingaman Burt, Illustrator speaking at CreativeMornings/Portland (*watch the talk)
“When my correspondents reproach me for tardiness, I can only say that I give as much attention to a letter as I do to anything I write, and I work at least six and sometimes sixteen hours a day.”
~ William S. Burroughs
(via Brain Pickings)
“If we want to really show what design is and what it can do, we need to get design elevated to the partner level. Partners have major equity stakes, real decision-making power, and are involved in product development from the beginning.” – Cameron Kozcon
A quote I keep coming back to. Taken from an A List Apart post written by my studiomate and friend Cameron Kozcon: An Important Time for Design.
“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things. Make sure to check out this collection of various Two Things. I must now think about what they are for blogging…
(via bobulate)
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
Seth Godin’s hill approach to career development.
(via bobulate)
This quote by Michael Bierut is from his January 2010 CreativeMornings Talk. Seriously worth watching.
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and – SNAP – the job’s a game!
- Mary Poppins
Raising money for your startup is not about the money. It’s about finding people to work with that you like and trust. Someone you wouldn’t hesitate to ask anything, and won’t make you feel stupid when you do. …
If you do go down the VC path, choose wisely. Your investors are one of the most important hiring decisions you’ll make.
(via @howells)
“It’s only with the heart that one can see clearly. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(via Quora / via @collabfund)
“In the end, you need to master your craft, get over it, then focus on the people.”
— Larry Legend
A quote by my studiomate Larry during today’s CreativeMornings talk.
I’d love for us as an industry to be more tolerant, to encourage others and get rid of that underlying tone, that has crept in recently, of one-upmanship. I don’t expect everyone to get on, or even share the same opinion, but before making a snarky comment, ask yourself what real value it’s adding to the community? Personally, snarky comments on twitter remind me of one of a saying…
“Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength”.
- Sarah Parmenter, from her blog post “Do Unto Others..”
Urban sprawl is bad. Intellectual sprawl is good. Giving up the previous leads to the latter. Putting people close together forces them to rub off on one another.
- Frank Chimero
From a post by Frank Chimero titled A Series of Ill-Informed Hunches and Observations
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing.
It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
“Know that the Internet has no eraser.”
— Liz Strauss
(via AshleySimko)
You don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things. – Pilcher
(quote from Andrew Zucerkman’s CreativeMornings talk)
“Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.”
— Sarah Bernhardt
(via the Happiness Project)
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995
(via this fantastic Brain Pickings post)
All I want to be
is a person who makes things
and thinks about them.
– John Maeda
(From this wonderful post by Frank Chimero)
“I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.” — Carl Sandburg,
(via quote vadis)
Wise words by my studiomate Chris Shiflett:
I always take more pleasure in liking something than in disliking something. That’s not to say there aren’t some things that deserve to be liked and some things that deserved to be disliked, but I’m never fond of disliking something.
The lesson I’ve learned is to be wary of those who are. The ones who seem to think that being critical is the same as having good taste. Those people almost never have good taste, so their opinions don’t matter.
There’s no particular sophistication required to be a critic. We know this, because children often dislike foods they learn to love as adults.
So, even if what you’ve done isn’t so great, just remember that those who can’t say so with grace, those who seem to take pride in criticizing you, their opinions don’t matter. It may very well be that you’ve created a masterpiece, and they’re just children.
If you can learn to be a fair judge of yourself, you won’t feel the need to rely on other people’s opinions.
And then, of course, there’s always this.
“Expectations are just leftover praise. They are a blessing. If you didn’t have the capability to meet them, they wouldn’t exist.” — Chris Shiflett
(opening words by Chris Shiflett at the BrooklynBeta Conference)
‘Real Artists Ship‘ is a quote by Steve Jobs that Andrew Power turned into a wallpaper design.
(thank you Joel)
“Your Time is limited. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life”. – Steve Jobs
