The Holstee Manifesto. Get it here.
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Steve Jobs, 1985 (via)
Posters by Alain de Botton and Anthony Burrill (on sale here).
“What hurts more, the pain of hard work or the pain of regret?”
(Image: Paul Pierce works out at the Celtics training facility in Waltham, Mass., fall 2010.)
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Albert Einstein (via)
The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.
Arnold Bennett (via jadorelavie)
(via booklover)
Source: jadorelavie
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
- Chuck Close
Via wearethedigitalkids. Image from Wisdom
Train your weakness, race your strength
An adage of bicycle racers (via Frank Chimero)
Play the game for more than you can afford to lose … only then will you learn the game.
Winston Churchill (via The Impossible Cool).
There is no dishonor in losing the race. There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose.
The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)
The habit of being great
Paul Graham on what he looks for in a YCombinator application:
We don’t look for any particular thing. We just look for people who have a habit of being great. Just so long as when they do things, they tend to do them well.
That and “be succinct; don’t just blather on ad infinitum,” he points out.
Not unlike what Jim Coudal has emphasized about interviews with two candidates when both are equally talented, “I will always hire the one who can write.” So you know.
(via Bobulate)
Dream big, implement small.
