![Another era [2]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/cd74adf7361ac69cc696bf4eca0eadb3/tumblr_mlukgqfZVu1qcc00qo1_500.jpg)
Another era [2]
Another era.
Nevertheless, we’re four years later and the only thing we have to show for it is easy rounded corners, and yet another UI library that doesn’t really work well. It’s incredibly disappointing. I want to solve new and hard problem, not recreate a terrible 4 year old widget library… again. That’s why I’m done with the web.
“That concern of hypocrisy keeps us small. It keeps our world small, it keeps our horizons limited, and it keeps our self-worth as low as it can conceivably go. Because we’re defining ourselves in large part by what other people claim that we are. Whether or not that’s what it is. When the truth is, we’re all a goddamn mess. Every single one of is is completely all over the map, and people who tend to obsess over that stuff the most, in my opinion, are people who probably should. And the people who obsess most about hypocrisy, are the people who are least wiling to change. They have the least room to change. If you set yourself up as this paragon, this Confucian paragon of perfection, then you have a lot to lose by being shown as being anything less than 100%. But once you allow yourself to be imperfect, you’re allowed to be a broken piece of pottery and still be pretty. Your world gets a lot bigger.”
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“It’s spontaneous combustion. I don’t know what’s going to work until I start to draw. It is so out of your hands it is amazing. It just started to happen… There’s so much I don’t now [sic] about the procedure.”
We should try not to forget what it’s like to not know. The brilliant spontaneity of ignorance, the possibilities afforded by knowing no limit of expression, the potential of being mostly incapable and not knowing it—work produced as such has a quality, an energy, buried deep inside. We may go back one day and be surprised by the recklessness of our old creations and inspired by such chaotic energy. Those first projects exist out of time, criticism, or expectation. They are as you were. And think how remarkably easy it is, to be as hard on others as you were on yourself.
“I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day – and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen.”
Wish the iOS timer had an expiration indicator.
