✨ Where great ideas come from
Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
Great ideas require taste
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. – Robert Hughes
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 more
Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity
Research as leisure: A desire to ask and answer questions, a commitment to evidence, an understanding of what already exists, an output, a certain degree of contemporary relevance, and a community
In a pre-AI world, whether you were building software or teams, or writing books or marketing plans, you needed to strip the problems you were facing down to their bare elements—their essence—and work your way forward from there. In building software, you need to define your core user and the problem you want to solve; in writing books, you need a... See more
Dan Shipper • Five New Thinking Styles for Working With Thinking Machines
Essences vs. sequences
Design has evolved to meet the challenge of the new relationship between people and the material goods they need. Today, designers — artisans, manufacturers, engineers, architects — think far beyond the way things look. Comparing pre-industrial design to post-industrial design with a picture is absurd. Critiquing a modern object based on its... See more
Beauty in the machine: post-industrial design
Ideas evolve gradually over years and decades into their final shape. The new form has many micro decisions behind it
People who read widely and attentively—and then publish the results of their reading—are also arguably performing research as a leisure activity. Maria Popova, who started writing a blog in 2006—now called The Marginalian —which collects her reading across literature, philosophy, psychology, the sciences. Her blog feels like leisurely research, to... See more
Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity
Building thoughts and ideas over decades
Good things take time. Some of the best companies took many years before they found the right recipe
If you think the next big idea in your field will come from inside the field, you're probably wrong. https://t.co/hx6gG2jGi3
If you think the next big idea in your field will come from inside the field, you're probably wrong.
Taste requires focus