On getting lost during a creative effort
“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.”
-Ed Catmull
#Quotes #Longquotes
”Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life."
–Steve Jobs
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“We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.”
-Clayton Christensen
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“It may seem like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions. And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.”
-Charles Duhigg
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”Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
-General Jim Mattis
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The 30-60-90 Day plan is dead
In which I lament the death of traditional onboarding timelines for product managers and suggest continuous, overlapping feedback loops that prioritize learning, shipping, and scaling from day one instead.
“Bureaucracies form when people’s jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.”
-Scott Berkun
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“Gray hair signals an enhanced ability to survive—conditional on having reached the gray hair stage, a man is likely to be more resistant to the vagaries of life.”
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.”
-Ed Catmull
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Advice for new college students
In which I offer the advice I wish I had received at the start of my freshman year of college
“Place a monkey in a cage, and it is the same as a pig, not because it isn’t clever and quick, but because it has no place to freely exercise its capabilities.”
-Huainanzi
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We must acknowledge the random events that went our way
“We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.“
-Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
#Quotes #Longquotes
“Good listening, when it works, reveals new worlds beneath the surface of people’s words.“
-Charles Duhigg
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Good work. Real problems.
In which I reflect on my father’s recent passing and the importance of doing meaningful work in your life
”Adopt this ruthless strategy toward the past: Burn all the books, and train yourself to react to circumstances as they happen.”
-Robert Greene
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“Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today.“
-Peter Thiel
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”We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
-Ray Bradbury
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“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
-Maya Angelou
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I love Sapkowski’s writing. There are three separate interludes nestled between chapters 8 and 9 of Season of Storms.
He reminds me that - of course - the structure of a novel isn’t a rigid thing. It can be playful and surprising.
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems.”
-Frank Wilczek
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