She told me that the key to a good meal is matching the chef’s time: take as much time to eat the dish as it took to prepare it. I always filed it away in my head, but never quite knew how to classify the sentiment. It’s just within the past few days that I’ve understood that the reason I liked the thought so much was because of how kind it seemed. To match attention is to be kind.
Because creativity, it’s just so much — it’s so inwardly focused. And I find that it’s so helpful to be pulled out of that system, otherwise I can just drown in myself. [Having a day job] means you can just make whatever you want to make. And what’s more independent than that? What I’m talking about is a problem of success, but we need to make sure that it’s not taboo to talk about the problems of success if we want to be successful. If we want ourselves and other people to be successful, we need to address the problems on the other side as well. I don’t want to drown in other people’s expectations. My own are hard enough. If what you make goes anywhere, it’s because other people carried it.
If you think you can’t step away, do it anyway for one day to see how much trouble it causes. That’s useful information. Dump your brain on to a sheet of paper—every single thing you could hope to do in the next 3 to 4 months. Then, look at your task list. Have the author sign each one. Did you write it, or was it fear, that nasty tyrant in your head? Cross off anything written out of fear. Listen: some drudgery is unavoidable, but you’re living your one and only life. You get to drive
Life was not life or death. Life was life and _life_, …I had to slowly reintroduce living after a season of dying, like an astronaut’s body re-acclimating to gravity. Nothing notable happened in the six months after my mother passed away. I watched life go by and it was the sweetest thing I have ever, ever experienced. All the while, know this: you’re growing.
And so here we are: leaning on an open, beautifully staid, inert protocol. SMTP as our savior. Mr. Chimero almost never writes but when he does makes the day a good day. These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post.
Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk. Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do. I don’t bring this up to imply that the young are dumb or that the inexperienced are inept—of course they’re not. But remember: if you stick around in the industry long enough, you’ll get to feel all three situations. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago. This situation is annoying to me, because my thoughts turn to that young designer I mentioned at the start of my talk. How many opportunities did I have to reproduce what I saw by having legible examples in front of me? And how detrimental is it to have that kind of information obfuscated for her? Before, the websites could explain themselves; now, someone needs to walk you through it.
