christmasgorilla - { chris muscarella } @christmasgorilla - Tumblr Blog

Posts

They say Odysseus, wearied of wonders, wept with love on seeing Ithaka, humble and green. Art is that Ithaka, a green eternity, not wonders.

-Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Poetry

If this is what it means to eat your own dogfood (and use your own product), then I'm very happy to do this for eternity.

It seems wrong to call it ‘business’. It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher – and none of us wavered in the belief that ‘stakes’ didn’t mean ‘money’. For some, I realize, business is the all-out-pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living – and at some point in the late 1970’s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is – you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.

Phil Knight [ Founder of Nike ], Shoe Dog - A Memoir

Knight's memoir is a wonderful read: funny, insightful, self-deprecating—but still sincere. I've always hated words like "businessman" and "entrepreneur" because they never really got at the inspiration for doing a thing. Knight shows a path of passion and happy accidents and spirit that led to Nike and it's place in culture and commerce—which all ring deeply true.

Good bye yellow brick road...

For the last couple of weeks, there was a secular pilgrimage that took place on Lake Iseo in Italy. The Floating Piers was concepted and created by Christo—and was his first public work since the death of his lifelong partner, Jeanne-Claude. They had imagined the project together years before.

It was beautiful. I feel lucky to have participated. More: the world needs more pilgrimages.

#art #culture

Maps to Guide Your Way: Virtuous Cycles

The above chart is the virtuous cycle created by Jeff Bezos in the Amazon team in 2001. I wrote a little thing about virtuous cycles and reference a few other legendary ones: a map created by Walt Disney showing what Disney would become, the Uber cycle drawn by David Sacks, and how Twilio and Stripe create new markets with their own virtuous cycles. I was also just nerding out with the Medium writing tools, which are excellent.

Mark Zuckerberg walking to give the keynote at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.

I try to be optimistic about technology in general—as well as Virtual Reality (VR). Sometimes that's difficult.

#trends #virtualreality #markzuckerberg

Reasonable people do reasonable things and only unreasonable people can do unreasonable things. Most practical business people are reasonable. George Bernard Shaw once said, "the reasonable person adapts themselves to the world, the unreasonable person tries to adapt the world to themselves. Hence, all human progress depends on the unreasonable person." Martin Luther King said something similar in that, "Human progress depends on the socially maladjusted."

Vinod Khosla on conventional wisdom on Quora.

As a creative, it doesn't matter how big the house is, how big your name is, how much money you have, your job is to create while you're here, and if anyone is in the way of that, if anything gets in the way of that, if anything is stopping that or slowing it down, you've got to burn it to the [fucking] ground. You have to die. This is me talking to you. I'm not giving you any suggestions. You have to die for what is in you because that thing might inspire someone.

Kanye West talking at the Footwear News Achievement Awards

merlin

’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.

David Foster Wallace (1996)

#david foster wallace

Horowitz applied the same philosophy to his newest work, The Pickle Index, which tells the story of a delightfully unskilled circus troupe against the backdrop of a fascist dystopia, united by a forced devotion to fermented items. “There are all these different ways that you can read that are valid, so I wanted to fully imagine all of those formats. So: the book-iest book I could do, and the app-iest app. Even the paperback, and the Kindle version. They’ll have their own sort of thing, with different reaches and different audiences.” For the hardback version of The Pickle Index, you go back and forth, chapter to chapter, between two beautifully illustrated volumes, each around 100 pages. For the paperback, those chapters are integrated, this time with accompanying woodcut illustrations. And then there’s the app, which releases sections of the narrative over the course of 10 days. Horowitz paid for the 5000-copy hardcover run himself; whatever profits it and the app makes will be his and Quinn’s. When I ask how he’ll know if the project is a failure, he pauses. “I don’t see how this project could fail,” he says. “It just is! It might turn out well, people might like it, I might think back on it more fondly or less fondly. But it can’t be a failure. Failure is when you’re trying to be the No. 1 photo sharing platform, and then you either are or you aren’t.”

Eli Horowitz has created a remarkable world for himself to live in.

BuzzFeed: Eli Horowitz Wants to Teach You How to Read

#culture #literature #heroes

#education #futureofwork

What's the German word for the amazingly guilty pleasure you get when listening to pure pop music under the guise of intellectual curiousity based on playlists from John Seabrook's book, Song Machine?

I opened Momofuku Noodle Bar and it failed. People forget that. Nobody wanted it! And it was only when it was like, “Fuck it, fuck everybody, we’re gonna do it this way, that it started to work, because we just started to be ourselves.”

David Chang, Interviewed by Todd Kliman

A lot of young people can’t handle this type of store. They want everything to look like a supermarket, like Barnes & Noble. Very neat. Some young people come in and they say, “Do you have a computer?” I’m like, “No, do you want to buy a computer?” and then they start to walk out. They don’t know how they’re supposed to find anything without a computer—like, they want Hemingway, and I tell him that their book is under the “Hemingway” section. “Oh my God, how did you find it?” They don’t think to ask for help from me. Because they grew up on computers. They’re very oriented that way. And they all take pictures of the store, even if they don’t buy anything! It’s because they never saw a messy bookstore. There used to be a lot of used bookstores in New York, for many years, on Fourth Avenue. People come by and say, "Oh you’re still here! Thank God, you’re the last of the breed."

The Last Messy Bookstore in New York Leaves my Neighborhood

...and we gain some things as a culture and lose others (like remembering how to talk to strangers)

#New York City #culture #books

Aki Inomata has done something beautiful: which is to 3-D print new homes for some hermit crabs. This crab is living in New York City.

It's small things like this that get me excited for ways that the built and natural worlds are colliding more and more—and that there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic rather than dystopian.

"It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be." -Daniel Libeskind, Seven Leading Architects Defend the World's Most Hated Buildings

#architecture #modernity

As scientists know, you can’t prove something by locating examples where it happens to be true; you have to try to disconfirm your hypothesis. In this case, knowing that customers can imagine a place for the product in their lives isn’t enough. You need customers who cannot avoid solving the problem.

- Merrick Furst

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

christmasgorilla - { chris muscarella }