Craft
Doing things; Doing things well
Craft
Builders build the future, translators get it adopted
Translators use metaphorical (and literal) language, design patterns, workflows, and even entire products that relate to existing paradigms in order to transition users to new paradigms.
Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:
- Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read
Substack • Notes | Substack
Be ambitious about the process, not just the outcome. (To use my own hobby as an example, when I bake, I put on some good music, I take my time, I eat too much batter. That way, if the recipe implodes–like when I accidentally mixed up powdered sugar and flour–the whole thing isn’t a wash.)
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • This Will Change the Way You Think About Ambition
Well-crafted things are laborious endeavors. A lot of the inputs and thought put into it will likely never be seen or understood. It might seem like a waste. The process improves not just the thing being crafted, but the crafter as well.
Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product | Linear
linear.app
If you are going to paint a picture for me, I want to see it
From David Ogilvy:
... See moreThrough maddening repetition, some of my obiter dicta have been woven into our culture. Here are some of them:
(1) “We sell – or else."
(2) “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”
(3) "We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a
Practice makes [you] perfect…
David Lynch: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”