the start of an idea

Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

It also aligned the computer with something that is often inspiring to many people and artists: nature. If I can find the sublime in microchips and SD cards in the same way that I find the sublime in mountains and waterfalls, I begin to look at my computer not as a tool but as a landscape. And when I look at it as a landscape it feels good because... See more

How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

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

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"In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts."

If that's not bad enough, the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to have potential, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it delivers the necessary business value. We call that time to money

No one will remember if it was on time, but everyone will remember if it was bad

— Michael Beirut quoting Massimo Vignelli (Typeradio 2/2)

when making things becomes frictionless, starting stops meaning anything.