Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by.
Let alone continue past it.
1️⃣ Early Work (Paul Graham, 2020)
“Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start.”
James Blake - Godspeed
2️⃣ The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations (Marginal Revolution, 2018)
“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.”
Sending an Attractive Lookalike to My High School Reunion
3️⃣ Tales of the Trash: A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt (New Yorker, 2014)
“And the information that he gathers from the trash helps him interact with residents. In addition to the door-to-door collection, he sorts garbage in the street, collecting it into piles that are hauled away by trucks. He greets everybody who passes, asking about spouses and children, and he’s particularly attentive to details of health. On his early-morning rounds, he comments on whether a resident is receiving injections, or taking medicine, or wearing diapers. If something seems particularly interesting, he’ll open the bag for my benefit.”
Getting destroyed at Nazare POV
4️⃣ Inside Bjarke Ingels's Innovative Houseboat (Architecture Daily, 2020)
“Those vistas may have distracted him from the enormity of the project at hand. “People had warned me that living on a houseboat was simultaneously the best and worst thing,” Ingels recalls. “When it’s great, it’s epically great. When it sucks, it sucks so massively.” So he and Otero discovered that first winter as they went without heat and running water at times, waking up to freezing temperatures and once resorting to bottles of San Pellegrino to bathe before a client meeting.”
Brian Wilson and George Martin in studio
5️⃣ How Apple Is Organized for Innovation (HBR, 2020)
“When Jobs arrived back at Apple, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. General managers ran the Macintosh products group, the information appliances division, and the server products division, among others. As is often the case with decentralized business units, managers were inclined to fight with one another, over transfer prices in particular. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs, in his first year returning as CEO, laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization.”
The Highs and Lows of Ken Bone's Fifteen Minutes of Fame | The New Yorker Documentary
6️⃣ Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify (Alex Danco, 2020)
“So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll come up for air and think, ok, I got this; and then you’ll try to start doing stuff. Then you’ll really struggle, because you won’t be in that happy new float-around-and-learn-people’s-names mode, you’ll be in oh-shit-can-I-really-do-this mode. It’s actually a little scary. But then around month five or six, you start to actually figure some things out for real. And then it starts to feel fun.”
Sorkinisms - A Supercut
7️⃣ The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion (GQ, 2020)
“Marc Polymeropoulos awoke with a start. The feeling of nausea was overwhelming. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. He tried to stand up and fell again. It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow hotel room was spinning around him. His ears were ringing. He felt, he recalled, “like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time.”
Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as “grizzled.” Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America’s long war on terrorism. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time.”