Building

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it?

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Sitting down and just thinking hard does not magically produce valuable discoveries either. The essence of the word "interaction" implies a relationship between a human and an environment. In my experience, great revelations surface from making something — filling your headspace with a problem — and then going for a synthesising daydreaming walk to... See more

When you wait, you lose momentum. And momentum is incredibly powerful because when you’re inspired, you act—and you do it with enthusiasm.

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the... See more

The thing is, once it's clear what to do, the technical parts may be challenging, but they're pretty much achievable. What's really complicated is everything that happens before that. Before there's a working piece of software, a bunch of people need to communicate through different languages, since there are only humans in between the customer and... See more

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid that?