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a place for thinking about doing great work
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At best, what any of us can hope for with our creative work is to organize, clarify or more clearly convey the unnameable that lives within us.
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.
– Henry Moore (sculptor)
Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.
Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic
As a rule, in a corporate environment, never signal that you buy the dream or that you crave an audience, as each of these can be provided at little to no cost for the employer and for little or no lasting benefit to you. Instead, signal that you crave the two things of real, lasting value a quality employer can offer: a learning environment and,... See more
The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers - Marginal REVOLUTION
To signal a desire for learning, do cool things that require you to learn and do more than the job requires. Employers are, in general, sort of like archeologists: They study artifacts to understand the people who made them. So make artifacts that demonstrate you like to learn things.
The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers - Marginal REVOLUTION
Everything is possible but nothing is easy
/// 100 QUESTIONS /// to gain clarity via Alex Morris:
Why are we doing this?
Ask that of yourself and the team with regularity.
What’s the simplest explanation?
What reaction should all the creative achieve?
What’s your most controversial opinion?
What little frictions exist that might bleed out the work if allowed to compound?
Are you solving a
So the lesson there is... look for any sort of excuse, however silly or arbitrary, to make anything at all. Because everything we do tends to leave some traces of everything that we are.