Tejas Gawande
- Where will we see luxury software transform markets? Already, in the consumer productivity space, we’re starting to see “luxury” email clients, calendars, browsers, and search engines emerge. While all of these capabilities are freely accessible to consumers and rather commoditized, companies like Superhuman for email, Cron (now Notion) for calenda... See more
from Disruptive Interfaces & the Rise of Luxury Software by Scott Belsky
Luxury software. In the world of luxury software, designers will shift from being “interface builders” to “software artists.”
Great ideas come from stretching our imagination and focusing on the core need. How can we improve performance for people who spend the most time doing X or care about how they are perceived doing X?
- Consumer demand for smaller scale and human-crafted versions of everything will grow in an AI world. While the future of work might lend itself to small business creation, let’s ****not forget the demand side of the equation. We are going to crave artisanal and story-driven sources and experiences. Why? As every big company floods the zone of our a... See more
from The Era of Scaling Without Growing & the Meaning Economy by Scott Belsky
AI might drive growth of more 'artisanal entrepreneurs'
Taste requires focus
Steve Jobs, on Microsoft:
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product.
Great ideas require taste
- 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.
from Elizabeth Goodspeed on the importance of taste – and how to acquire it
Great ideas require taste
- At some point in their teenage years—and sometimes earlier—the future geniuses would apprentice themselves intellectually to someone with exceptional capacity in their field.
from Childhoods of exceptional people
Exception people did some kind of cognitive apprenticeships in their teenage.
Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subj
... See morefrom Childhoods of exceptional people
Exceptional people were heavily tutored 1-on-1 (Not just regular tutoring). Helping another person grow rapidly requires a deep and delicate bond.
- A lot of care went into curating the environment around the children—fascinating guests were invited, libraries were built, machines were brought home and disassembled—but the children were left with a lot of time to freely explore the interests that arose within these milieus.
A qualified guess is that they spent between one and four hours daily in... See morefrom Childhoods of exceptional people
Exception people in their childhood had time to roam about and relied heavily on self-directed learning
- Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus
This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at.
These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exception... See morefrom Childhoods of exceptional people
The adults had high expectations of the children; they assumed they had the capacity to understand complex topics, and therefore invited them into serious conversations and meaningful work, believing them capable of growing competent rapidly.