Great sculptures aren’t manufactured — they’re discovered. The sculptor studies and listens to the slab of marble. He identifies with the stone. Then, he responds. He enables the marble to speak for itself, setting free something beautiful that hidden was inside all along.
Impressions per hundred iPad impressions? What a great metric for the “non-iPad tablet” category.
Attack from a position of strength. Build on your previous successes. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Amazon is doing here. The other guys — the Samsungs, HTCs, Motorolas, RIMs — can’t match Apple’s hardware design, don’t even try to match Apple in terms of original and differentiated software, and struggle to match Apple’s prices because they don’t have the economy of scale advantages Apple does. Those guys can’t match Amazon either, because they have no content to sell. Amazon can give away the razor because they’re already in the business of selling blades. The other guys don’t even have blades to sell.
Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth.
Though we have been building and programming computing machines for decades and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface.
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
Inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my work.
The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.
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Sheryl Sandberg profiled in The New Yorker (via garychou)
100% agree. It’s the same reason why I don’t like to schedule meetings in advance. I much prefer to do them on the fly because there are a million variables in a day that change constantly.
What appears to be organization is actually just a restriction on the most valuable thing in the world: time.
(via parislemon)
(via parislemon)
Software is an entropic system whose arrow of time flows in the direction of failure, aided and abetted by human bullshit.
There are people who do things, and people who snipe at the people who do things. Ignore the naysayers. They’ll never do anything.
It’s like choosing a contractor because they know how to forge and cast steel using coal, iron, an oven and a bellows, when they actually need to know a) the address of the nearest Home Depot b) what to do with the steel once they buy it.
don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These things are unskillful; these things are blameworthy; these things are criticized by the wise; these things, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them.
it takes quite a lot to make a black hole. More energy than is present in our entire solar system, by far.
