I worked on the concept of the archive today. It was hard to manage. Starting a project is the hardest thing in the world as you have choices about foundations. Archive today can be infinitely different by my choices. I have to make some to get into a point where it has a definition and my choices are improvements in a known world and environment. That is why starting any creative endeavor is so hard. I’m frustrated. I hope this ends sooner and I harm y working archive. There is so much I have to do.
If I use the distance to line mechanism I developed for the inner shadow inside of the LavaScroll, I can also do the rounded rectangle gradient that is applied on top of the aqua stuff and make the shader better.
Do I actually want that? I have to see.
Maestro Victor’s DynamicLand is sooo Apple in its design. It’s interesting how much maestro is rooted in Apple while wanting to depart from it.
Postman says he loves TV and writes in contradiction, I find modern world in the same air, and I think I could not have survived in the past…
Jony Ive constantly refers to ideas as “fragile beings”. There is not a single interview in which he does not bring up this “fragile” word. That has been stuck with me ever since. And we have to understand how private he is. In this modern age, his firm’s webpage only shows a pretty bear walking over the LoveFrom logo and out of the screen.
I think about this fragility and the private nature of Ive and every single creative person ever. To me they go hand in hand. And think about it, if ideas are fragile, we must keep them private and nurture them so they grow. A fragile idea has to first become something and then be shared others. It has to become something first. This makes me remember maestro Murakami as he writes in the introduction of “Absolutely on Music”:
Creative people have to be fundamentally egoistic. This may sound pompous, but it happens to be the truth. People who live their lives watching what goes on around them, trying not to make waves, and looking for the easy compromise are not going to be able to do creative work, whatever their field. To build something where there was nothing requires deep individual concentration, and in most cases that kind of concentration occurs in a place unrelated to cooperation with others, a place we might even call dämonisch.
It is brilliant. And I fundamentally believe in this. Yet, I also remember Hamming’s “You and Your Research” as he says:
[The one] who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but [they] also occasionally get clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Hamming also says in the same speech that:
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, “What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?”
It is also true for Einstein that he had a decade exercising a career that did not mean to him anything, and as to how mundane he found it, it gave him the space to work on his ideas. Fragile ideas must grow somewhere.
I have had plenty of thoughts, sharing a very new idea is always bound to be crushed by others. And I see it as logical. Every new idea is built upon many different previous works. Doing so the impact of a new idea is perhaps in the range of a percent to less than one percent of change to the previous works. Therefore, a new idea has to be preserved in isolation and only be trusted to the minds of a few who can nurture it, and build upon it, until the time the impact grows and the difference as well. Then the new idea is ready to be made public.
If you get the single ideas of Engelbart’s work, they don’t mean that much. When you connect them, it becomes the deepest of revolutions. Could this work be carried in public? Of course not. Could it be done in an individual’s isolation? Hardly. But could it be carried out by a team of only geniuses, who could nurture it? It did. Could Ive single handedly do all the design work at Apple? never. But with a team of super private geniuses? Yes.
Fragile ideas must be grown in isolation, in safe places.
We make things harder than they are to be seen as needed.