Pritesh

“Beauty is that moment when your mind jumps the curb. Beauty is the instant you sit up and start paying attention. Whatever makes that happen for you can be beautiful. ... But you have to be open to seeing it. Beauty doesn’t find you. You create beauty by looking for it.”

Storytelling is an art form that invites people along for a ride.

Finding one’s voice is an act of self-discovery. Finding one’s niche is an act of finding out who in the world thinks you’re interesting. Voice is brand identity; niche is market segment. Voice, inside out; niche, outside in.

Senses that are not cultivated tend to atrophy.

There are lot of different ways to define great design, but this display of obsessive care over the things that “no-one asked for” is probably my favourite. More than a little neurotic and almost never making financial sense, this desire to go further than required has always seemed to me so noble, a pure expression of the deferred love contained... See more

The appeal of learning through others is that it can be efficient. Books, mentors, case studies all compress years of experience into hours of consumption. But compression has a cost: it assumes a decoder. Without proper tacit knowledge, the message can lose meaning or, in some cases, be actively confused. In these cases, theory isn’t wrong, just... See more

Positive results—winning—count most. But until those results come through your door, a heavy dose of documentation relating to what you’ve done and what you’re doing, planning to do, and hoping to do may buy you just enough extra time to actually do it.

Just to give you a funny anecdote, during my first week at Instacart, I remember joining our weekly business review, and there was a team that had managed to save $0.01 per delivery through a set of optimization. And as soon as they announced that, the whole room erupted in applause. And I remember thinking, oh, we celebrate cents here.

The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context.