if you want something important or fun create it
“Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others… World-building means creating everything — not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself — the language, style, rules, and architecture.” - Yancey Strickler
exert your taste on the world to live in a reality you’ve consciously created https://t.co/wKR6LMKBRo
Working on difficult problems is also intellectually more rewarding to an engineer, which is who I am, after all. To sustain that interest though, it's important to work on a fun hard problem, one you are passionate about.
archive.org • Some Lessons Learned
It is clear that the path forward for me is to seek that balance of hard, valuable, and fun in every project I start, join, back, or advise. Hard is for intellectual engagement, the search for solution by any means necessary. Valuable is the knowledge that if this, whatever this is, works, the world will never be the same. Fun is the sense of
... See morearchive.org • Some Lessons Learned
Young people look at so many of the status games of older folks—what brand of car is parked in your garage, what neighborhood can you afford to live in, how many levels below CEO are you in your org—and then look at apps like Vine and Musical.ly, and they choose the only real viable and thus optimal path before them. Remember the second tenet:
... See moreRemains of the Day • Status as a Service
You'll hear it again and again, the easiest way to empathize with your users is to be the canonical user yourself. I tend to subscribe to this idea, which is unfortunate because it means I have hundreds of apps installed on my phone at any point in time, just trying to keep up with the product zeitgeist.
Remains of the Day • Status as a Service
This is why it is so important to figure out the big question you’re trying to answer. Putting yourself in situations that feed your mind what it’s hungry for lets you outwork everyone else without even realizing you’re working. You’re just trying to answer your question!
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited
... See moreCeline Nguyen • research as leisure activity
it discourages a certain form of dilettantism—peering into an adjacent field that you don’t have the “right” background for, using techniques you aren’t “qualified” to be doing, introducing references and sources that are nontraditional and even looked down upon in your primary field. Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these
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