Build Something Beautiful
The craft of building great things
Yoshio Goto and
Build Something Beautiful
Patrick Collison on Stripe:
“My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons.
Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe... See more
We are very fluent in blunt, materialistic, capitalist questions: What? How soon? How much? What I hope that we can learn to do is add questions of moral imagination to that mix: questions like “Why?” and “To what human effect?” and “How much is enough?”
The On Being Project • Living the Questions
Kurt, Dave and Chris:... See more
First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album1, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I've had to go through it all. Apology
Shaun Usher • I would like to be paid like a plumber
a great f*cking letter from Steve Albini to Nirvana.
There is a children’s TV show called Bluey 3, which follows a family of anthropomorphic dogs and their life in Australia. The lineup includes Bluey, a 6-year old Blue Heeler puppy, and her family: her dad Bandit, her mom Chilli, and her little sister Bingo.
Bluey is an Australian TV show that premiered in 2018 created by Joe Brumm who wanted to... See more
Bluey is an Australian TV show that premiered in 2018 created by Joe Brumm who wanted to... See more
When You Destroy the Tools of Creativity
If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche... See more
But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche... See more
Do: make creative decisions that don’t (or do) scale + makes the heart sail.
Don’t: make creative decisions based on PnLs, on balance sheets, on gimmicky trends that appeal to a short-term audience.
Our choice of the particular work we do depends on the whole context of our life and society and current needs, of course; but there is also just a general orientation that emerges out of almost any set of accumulated experiences of doing something useful, particularly as part of a coordinated exchange with others. And there is profound, life-giving value in even the seemingly mundane ways we apply our minds and direct our focused efforts toward purposeful ends that matter to us. This could be as complex as building an entire company, or it could be as simple as flipping burgers at a restaurant. It could also be volunteering at a shelter, if we make a serious and sustained project of it.
in order to will any meaningful new project into existence, I actually must be untethered from reality. I need to view the world as bendable and controllable, not as this unchangeable force for me to analyze and carefully dodge around. So for me, “becoming more agentic” has really been a project in carefully maintaining a state of delusion.