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Me, Neil Perkin, giving an introduction to my book

Me, Neil Perkin, on a key model for digital transformation

The best career advice, from Scott Adams

“The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development. The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure. People begin to get better when they fail—they move towards failure, they discover something as a result of failing, they fail again, they discover something else, they fail again, they discover something else. So the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success. As a result of that, I believe that Picasso is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests. Because whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it. And as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary. It is the opposite of what happens in the typecasting for professional accomplishment.

Milton Glaser

`Ikigai (生き甲斐, pronounced [ikiɡai]) is a Japanese concept meaning "a reason for being". Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self.’

austinkleon

Stewart Brand, working in a shipping container, from How Buildings Learn

My research library was in a shipping container twenty yards away–one of thirty rented out for self-storage. I got the steel 8-by-8-by-40-foot space for $250 a month and spent all of $1,000 fixing it up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch, and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-in-progress–all the notes, tapes, 5x8 cards, photos, negatives, magazines, articles, 450 books, and other research oddments laid out by chapters or filed carefully.

…

I knew from editing Whole Earth Catalogs that the most important tool for organizing projects is lots of horizontal space and immediate-to-hand storage. Boat carpenter Peter Bailey built it cheap and sturdy. He told me I would regret using plywood for pinning up photos and other graphics on the walls, and he was right…

People asked, “How can you stand it in there without windows?” All I could say was “A library doesn’t need windows. A library is a window.” In February I was using the flat space to organize Chapter 12 with the 5x8 cards on which all the book’s raw research was taped. By this time I had followed Peter Bailey’s advice to have sheet steel on the walls, and little magnets holding up the photos.

Lots of horizontal space…

This reminds me so much of David Hockney’s work method for Secret Knowledge, how he pinned up the whole history of western painting on his studio wall:

Read more on shipping container architecture and see my friend John T Unger’s plans for his studio made of shipping containers.

Filed under: lay it all out where you can look at it

neilperkin

Would quite like a shipping container myself

bijan

Today it is easy to learn about starting a business. You can get practical advice and to-do lists at the click of a button. However, what you can’t get from others is the understanding about why you are doing what you are doing and toward what end. If only I had heard this story earlier, I would have made fewer — or perhaps different — mistakes.

Gone Fishing | Om Malik (via bijan)

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Cecil Day Lewis

The evolution of Lara Croft

When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world. Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.

Paul Graham

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Steve Jobs

Ira Glass on 'The Gap'

nevver

Time for a rewrite

The Fear That Everything Has Already Been Done

Lion's Head from Table Mountain

Misty morning dog walk #latergram

#latergram

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