Greatness
exploring the foundations of quality and the currents that fight against mediocrity
by sari and · updated 3mo ago
Greatness
be extremely critical of all your work until it’s great. it’s not about you personally, it’s about how people feel and receive the work
H/t patrick oshag
sari added 7mo ago
A great lil story from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure w
... See moresari added 8mo ago
focus on quality. There’s no competitive advantage in volume. You are going to lose to the robots.
sari added 9mo ago
Love this definition of art, from Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
... See moreArt is anything you can do well, anything you can do with quality, anything where there are options for doing it well or poorly. And there are very few things in this world that don't have options for doing it well or poorly. So you can make an art
sari added 10mo ago
“anything where there are options for doing it well or poorly”
The human species was given this tremendous gift of neuroplasticity, the ability to change ourselves and be better in deliberate ways. My definition of greatness is anyone that’s making that effort, even in a tiny way, just to take this incredible machinery that we were given—our nervous system—and to leverage it toward being better, feeling better
... See moresari added 1y ago
greatness isn't random
sari added 1y ago
- From Christopher Alexander foreword to Richard Gabriel's "Patterns Of Software": In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at m... See more
alex added 1y ago
- 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 some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only ... See more
sari added 1y ago
- Walter Isaacson on the link between suffering and greatness and those with happy childhoods: “We grow up with fewer demons but we grow up with less drive. We end being Boswell and not Johnson. We end up being the observer and not the doer. Respect those who are in the arena…” A few years ago, I learned that Jobs, Ellison, Musk and Bezos hav... See more
andrea added 1y ago